My Forth and Final Trip to Cusco and the Sacred Valley
Click on pictures to enlarge...

"Sometimes I go in pity of myself, and all the while, a great wind is bearing me across the sky."
Ojibwa Indian Proverb

"To my way of thinking, there is nothing more delightful then to be a stranger, and so I mingle with human beings because they are not of my kind, precisely to be a stranger amongst them."
Paul Bowles

But first, an introduction. The Quechua people of Cusco love to put on public shows that demonstrate their skill in music, dancing, and ritual story telling. Here is a video of the splendid Dance of the Condors, performed on Cusco’s main square, the Plaza de Armas.


9/27/08 8:00AM
Seattle Airport
About to depart for Mexico City en route to Peru, Cusco and the Sacred Valley. Accompanied by Ginsberg, Indian Journals, stellar, hallucinated travel masterpiece. Leaving USA at an extraordinary time in history... the economy days away from total collapse unless the fools in Washington can straighten things out in time. Today is Saturday, zero hour arrives on Monday or Tuesday. Credit evaporates, ATMs cease to function; total circulatory collapse. Like the fulfillment of prophecy, which it is, of course. Looks like 2012 is commencing right on schedule.

Put me down gently, my life is in your hands...

So what? The world is sick of us and we are sick of ourselves. So, what's an unemployed guy to do? Why, take a vacation, of course. I want to stroll through the capital of an ancient civilization destroyed by greed, corruption and arrogance, the same things that are destroying ours. Was the Spanish conquest with its atrocities a five hundred year old foreshadowing of all that was to go wrong with America and the West?

America: an up and coming third rate country. Will we take the rest of the world down with us?

4:30PM
Mexico City Airport
Airline error in your favor. Collect one first class seat. They are definitely more comfy. Lots of leg room. Attendants pamper you with extravagant food and drink, all free. I'll be sticking to coach class in the future however. Airline error? Scheduling. I am leaving now for Lima instead of tomorrow. But that means changing my flight to Cusco with Star Peru. Also, I won't have time to visit the fabulous National Museum of Anthropology with its amazing Mayan and Aztec artifacts (i.e the 25 ton stone Aztec Sun Disk calendar.) So, fuck it. Hope Star Peru will do it for free. (They did.)

9/28/08
Lima Airport
Got even earlier flight to Cusco, now here at 5AM and waiting. Arrived here from Mexico City like an arrow shot from a bow off the shores of Turtle Island. Approach to Mexico City: another to-the-horizons city in extent. Immense. Block after block of squat tenement buildings that look like they would topple over at the merest puff of wind. And a population of 18-20 million.

9/30/08
In Cusco two days now sick with cold and soroche. Slept for 48 hours! Bright, hot sunshiny morning to mid afternoon, then clouds and rain. Way past the tourist season, so the locals get to take their city back from the besieging mongrel hordes. Passed by the motorcycle rental place on Calle Saphi, lots of sleek new machines parked to the curb and beckoning.
Gonna pick one up for return trip down Sacred Valley. Cusco heart breaking as usual, one of the worst scenes of Christian desecration in the New World, unless you consider all of North America for that dubious distinction. Should I consider such trivialities as the upcoming presidential election for inclusion here? It will be historic. Barack Obama, first Afro-American to run on a major party ticket. Democratic of course. Versus the pathetic, despicable John McCain, who it appears, has pawned all he once cherished to the gutter. And his

unspeakably awful running mate, Sarah Palin. The worst VP selection in history, a paragon of stupidity and arrogance. Obama ahead at the moment. Better trot on down to the local Internet cafe to catch up on the latest bad news...

Later...in the sun splashed Plaza de Armas. So, the bailout measure has failed. Stocks plunge 778 points, biggest ever one day loss in history. So it goes. Back to the real world. It could not be a more beautiful day here in Cusco. Still sick, the worst case of soroche ever. Have not eaten solid food in three days. If the touts here on the Plaza only knew how close to impoverishment I am myself. Ah! The cool spray from the fountain upwind of me! Nausea, heartburn, gas, fatigue. None of this is helped by the fact that my friendship with MAR appears to be over...She reminds me of the old Lightnin' Hopkins song "Ball of Twine." So, while I'm trying to get through this without too much self pity, it still hurts a lot. Inca sun, dry up my tears...!

10/01/08

Over the soroche thank god. Still a bit shaky though. I'm back on the Plaza, half hoping to meet up with Delphina. Where could she be? In Lima probably, peddling her sad wares. Hard to resist the old Quechua grandmothers wrapped in their Indian blankets, toothless and imploring. Bought two dolls from one of them yesterday. Met with Frank, the renter of motorcycles, to kick start my tour of the Sacred Valley soon as I'm able.

For now, it is agreeable to hang out in Cusco and observe the ebb and flow of humanity and watch from the outside as the USA slowly implodes. McCain victory would spell disaster for the cosmos. Could Americans possibly be that stupid? Alas, yes. I feel good in a cosmopolitan, world citizen sort of way but cut off from family and friends, what few I have left. The sun, when it comes out, leans down and positively licks you with a sultry intensity. Eventually, you are compelled to seek shelter. Love the scent of wood smoke in the air and the sound of zampona pan pipe music amidst the colorful swirls of ponchos and mantas and long plaits of black braided hair.

The Plaza street people are ernest and hard working and I'm a sitting duck here. Been hit up a dozen times in thirty minutes. "No, gracias," I keep saying, trying to make "gracias" not sound like "grassy ass."

In general, the Peruvian people seem a happy lot. They don't have huge investments to worry about or prodigious numbers of material possessions to store and protect. Expressions range from tranquil to bemused; quick smiles and kind demeanors. Police and security people friendly and relaxed. Now sitting next to elderly Quechua woman worlds apart culturally and linguistically but one in our common human origins. You feel that a lot here.

I hardly have the strength to get up and take photos, an activity I'm feeling less and less inclined to do. You don't make friends in third world countries with a $2000 camera hanging around your neck. That's where the eyes go first, the expensive bauble you're carrying and then your face. Happy Peruvians! Their country is not a crumbling empire, hated around the world and the butt of nasty jokes from Lima to Peking. They are not an embarrassment to the common human values of decency and kindness, the only currency that has value anymore...

I can now state unequivocally that the cell phone has become the universal human accoutrement. They hang from the belts of everyone here, from every walk of life. I remember how surprised I was when I first saw them in large numbers in Lisbon ten years ago.

Time to get up and walk a bit...

10/2/08
Went back to the Central Market yesterday. I was worried that it, too had been demolished. So extraordinary. The cool, darkened interior bustling with activity. Young Indian mothers with their children playing nearby with all the goods of Peru on display. Looking for coca leaf, old
proprietress must have read my mind as I passed by. She promptly produced a small bag of leaves with the requisite hunk of hardened ash, perfect. Wandered about taking pictures and met beautiful, long blonde haired aging hippy from California, originally from Germany. We talked a bit, she's been traveling since she was eighteen. Heading up to Machu Picchu tomorrow. She's looking for a comb. We drink a glass of papaya and orange juice together. Had my first chew this morning, which buoyed me up for a while then left me feeling nauseous. Another intensely bright day in the Plaza.

Bad news from America. "Bailout" package headed for approval but stocks keep dropping. VP debates tonight, Biden vs. Palen. Big deal. Obama still leading in the polls.

Old Quechua man approaches, shows me his tattered clothing and shoes. Give him 50 soles, about sixteen dollars, a small fortune.

Hostel Sumaq Tikaq, Calle Tanda 114, high up in the San Blas district. Beautiful little corridor of greenery leads up to the entrance. Might just move camp up here. Now looking for Plaza Nazarenas and the ethnographic museum...

10/3/08
Yesterday finally stumbled upon the object of my quest, the exquisite Museo de Atre Precolombino. Cool and dark inside, it's more like a chapel, a holy place, than a museum, and so it is. Laid out in five or six medium sized rooms are the beautifully crafted artifacts in wood, metal, ceramics, bone and shell from six successive civilizations in Peru. (Nasca, Mochia, Hurari, Chancay, Chimu, and Inca.) Some of the works are beyond beautiful, defying definition in subtlety of execution, especially Hurari. This museum is worth all the cathedrals in Cusco put together. People walking through the various galleries speak in hushed tones, confirming its sacred status. Could not help contrasting these civilizations with our own, now stumbling and crashing its way towards oblivion.

The final flower of Peruvian civilization crushed by arrogance, greed and cruelty. Now these forces have turned on us, they've come to pay us a visit and it may be our turn to fall by the wayside. Let it come down!

Biden wins VP debate.

Peru, the new center of world spirituality. Been thinking of taking the ayahusca ceremony with Kush. Went to his shop in San Blas yesterday just in time to catch sight of the latest New Age fad: ayahusca tourism! Kush is becoming known as the Cusco shaman. Big, over weight kid comes lumbering in to inquire about the ceremony: He speaks with Kush's beautiful wife. Cost is $85, meet at shop for 4k drive into mountains, all night affair. We talk a bit outside. He seems as unlikely a candidate for ayahusca as could be imagined, but perhaps I'm being elitist. He's just the latest of a new generation hitting the Hippy Highway for kicks and enlightenment. Wasn't I on that road at one time? Ah me, I wish him luck.

Satori in Cusco! It's a good place for it.

I see its potential as a major center of spiritual practice and learning once purged of its tourist trappings after The Fall, heh heh...I can imagine countless hostels, restaurants and shops converted into classrooms, yoga and meditation halls, and centers for learning the Old Ways. All the essential elements are here - stupendous natural beauty, agreeable year around weather, a powerful legacy of indigenous, earth based spirituality, a bountiful, organic agriculture capable of supporting a large community, and access to native entheogens. Something would have to be done about the drinking water however, presently toxic to outsiders.

Well, too nice a day to waste, maybe head on up to Sacsayhuaman. (Bought ticket back to Lima for return trip on the 19th, $215.) While all America is doom and gloom, here in Cusco I'm sitting in the delightful Plaza Regocigo. Bright sunshine, gushing fountain, zampona music, children playing and oh yes, beautiful young women everywhere. Feeling much better today, might be up for ayahusca ceremony next week. Pigeon touts dance for bread crumbs, no shit!

Man in orange shirt approaches and begins to speak to no one in particular. He appears to be reciting something, or giving a speech or sermon of some kind. He departs as abruptly as he came, only to approach another bench, where he begins his speech again.

10/4/08

Yesterday, late afternoon, sound truck drove down Calle Saphi announcing in a shockingly sinister and robot-like voice some gathering or demonstration down on the Plaza. Didn't bother going but for hours I could hear loud, exclamatory speeches that droned on and on. I know little of the political or social fault lines that underlie Peruvian social and political life. You have Spanish, Quechua, Ayamara, Mestizo, and Amazon Rain Forest Basin tribes, interests and enclaves, plus a revival of the Maoist Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) terrorist lunacy "movement." They can only be encouraged by the success of the Maoist rebels in Nepal, who now run the country. Pachandra is now the fucking prime minister! Who would have believed that possible just two years ago? Given the extreme poverty here, especially amongst the indigenous people and a bitter history of conquest and colonization, you have all the ingredients for a Maoist styled uprising. Talk of revolution in America was a load of bullshit I thought. I doubt whether all the demonstrations, marches, be-ins, college take overs or other confrontations with "the establishment" resulted in even one less bomb being dropped on Vietnam or one less nuclear device being assembled. The military-industrial complex ruled unerringly then as it does now. No rag tag, slogan chanting rabble of students or ghetto dwellers was ever going to change that. Today we have the "political spectacle," that finely crafted show piece made for popular consumption by the evil doctors of propaganda, where everyone learns to pull the right levers like trained squirrels. And so the demonstration here yesterday? An old fashioned, outdoor propaganda show. Beware of the theoreticians!

And so, thoughts of home and who will now protect MAR now that my cloak of loving kindness has been yanked away. Hah! Old fantasy of Wise Protector. She has Uncle Daddy of course, and Daddy Jim. I was not a proper Daddy. I was the dangerous interloper who came forth out of darkness and mist (!) to lead her to her proper destiny. Well, she did take two or three baby steps, saw danger, and dashed right back inside. She may remain there, in stasis, for a very long time. Hence the irrational anger, the cold and hateful words of rejection.

Back to the Internet. What are the inhabitants of the monkey house up to now?

Up to Sacsyhuamen. The shattered remains of a Puma sculpture that encompassed all of Cusco in Inca times. Sacsy was the jaws of the beast. It was the vision of brilliant urban planning and mythology that joined heaven and earth in a consummate embrace.

10/5/08

Headed for Pisac by motorcycle. Soroche gone but I've got a cold and the air temperature is chilly - especially on a motorcycle. Didn't bring much in the way of a wind breaker. Big market day today though. Sun's out and brilliant at 7:30 AM.

10:30 AM
In Cararo
Things have changed. New, separate area for the artesemo. The old man with the exquisite Incan artifacts is gone. Now they just offer the usual fare - mass produced knick knacks and so-so textiles. Moving on to Pisac on Honda 250cc dirt bike. Every time I stop I'm like a grounded albatross. Bike is heavy and unwieldy so I flounder to stay upright. The day is sunny with big puffy white clouds. I may not be able to do this much longer. Failing strength in legs and arms, to say nothing of my deplorable back condition hobbles me like a lame beast of burden. Splendid backdrop of mountains here. Nice, authentic Andean folk music being played here over primitive PA system, similar to Bolivian music heard in La Paz a few years ago. The people in Cararo appear to be Mestizo, if not pure indigenous. The Apus are powerful here. Who could not help but pray to them? It is amazing how far up the mountain sides the farmers cultivate their fields. Time to move on. Apus protect me!

9:30 PM
Back from Pisac. Fell of the godamned motorcycle at least five times. Pisac now is huge, at least four times bigger than it was in 2003. It has become a victim of its own success. Every building is packed with all manner of tourista gewgaws. Fancy restaurants and bars compete everywhere for the tourista buck. It’s even starting to look like a posh fashion venue in some large city. The central square is still the focal point of selling, gossiping, and socializing, but radiating off from the square are streets overflowing with every conceivable tourist trinket known in Peru. Everything has a newly minted look to it. The streets are now paved with very serviceable stone work. New carpentry and glasswork gives it the “Aquas Caliente“ look. Well, that’s alright I guess. Many of the once penurious locals have grown prosperous from Pisac’s popularity with tour operators. Today the place looked like an ant hill. The original village had vanished beneath the tramp of innumerable camera toting tourists. The tourista buck strikes again, turning quaintness into cheap commercial fodder. Took a few good pictures. Still learning how to use this beast of a camera (Nikon D300.) So, to document the trip: take pictures, video, record sound and music, make journal entries, buy local CDs, collect choice artifacts: these are all your travel documentary assets. Gonna video the Central Market soon. Then gather everything together for editing, the fun part. This blog is just such a multi-media undertaking.

10/6/08

Why should it be that all good things that come to pass usually end badly? The hardy little stone temple that housed the purple and orange flame has been demolished. The flame itself has guttered and gone out. And so I am bereft because that little flame was nurturing and now I feel the cold tatters of distress and loss. I am distraught and undone and trembling like a leaf. My eyes stare out in all directions and my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. My breath is a stench and a pestulence. Cold showers of disgust and rivulets of shame percolate through my innards and my bowels are loosened. I gag on the acrid taste of vomit. I so fear what is to come, I feel so unready to engage friend or foe alike and that all besotted I must take to the road of the wanderer, the drifter, the outcast. Do not all occasions inform against me? Ah Mary, I wish you were here. I think I know what you were going through. And you Larry and you Paul and you Ben. You showed me what it was to be undone in this life, to be naked and shivering, receiving indifference where we had hoped to find comfort and companionship. The Great Adjudicator has tallied up the cost of our upkeep and presented us with the bill. Your life Your life Your life! Cloud ear, rain tongue, the taste of brackish water on parched lips; piss, shit, mucous, blood, spittle and bile vomited up to all glory? Final eye, nose, tooth, nails, skin, hair and entrails consumed on the funeral pyre, the burning ghat belching smoke to all glory? Stench of all smell, abomination of all sight, deadened ash of all taste. I touched my dead father’s forehead and felt the last of his bodily warmth fly up and hover away to kingdom come. The forces of decomposition set in long before you are dead I discovered. My poor dear old father! A fine mesh of black and gray filamentous mildew blotched his shoulders and chest while dementia tugged at and deformed his extremities into a grotesque rictus like a mummified ape. The eyes oozing! The mouth agape! the tongue protruding!

Shooting star mercury contrails in bright blue dots, wisps, and flashes. Begging bowl guerdon, patched robe and tattered straw sandals, as pathetic as a condemned man’s last meal.

Fuck it. Tonight I dine with the gods!

Fasting today? I hadn’t meant to. The return of healthy hunger is a good sign. I’ll go out in a while.

Flying down the Sacred Valley on a motorcycle is a thrill unlike any other. Urabamba River snaking silver in the distance. The cragged and eroded faces of immense cliffs, scoured and gouged out by wind and rain in all the primal colors of the earth. Going back in the other direction towards Cusco, it all fell away over my right shoulder into immensities of space. Heightened sense of speed, of falling and being caught and falling again, away and away into the depths of the earth and back again. And flying up and up to condor highway heavens, blessed Apus you favored me. Zampona flute in the wind. Dark lengths of black braided hair falling down the backs and shoulders of native women chewing coca in the market place. Old soup mouth eating his gruel and licking greasy fingers. Quechua mother trades drum stick for ice cream cone. Fresh orange juice, boiled rice and lentils, crust of bread and fat kerneled corn. Fragrence of parsley, mint, and garlic. Smoking coffers of meat! Steaming baskets of corn! Harangue, sell, barter, exchange, the smell of dust and old coins in the hot afternoon sun. Tincture of ayahusca in the shaman’s kettle, beautiful, doe-eyed attendant generously offers up her ample cleavage. Rare jewels dance from her pierced nipples. Belly button silver rings and twists of gold and silver tendrils, solar plexus tattoo radiating Panchmama potencies. Orb of sun on right elbow, crescent moon on left, sandalwood scent rises on curly cue clouds of incense...

Ah Christ! They won’t be there for me!

I will protect myself Bhikus, thus shall the foundations of mindfulness be established. And by protecting myself, I will protect others. Protecting oneself Bhikus, one protects others. Protecting others, one protects oneself. Thus should the establishments of mindfulness be practiced.

Nursing mothers! Breasts of burnt ivory! Oh yeah Panchamama! Sweet succulent mother’s milk, purple swollen nipples, eager lapping infant tongues. In the shade of the central square, Mom’s sweet smile.

Do not do the slightest thing that the wise would later censor. With good will to the entire cosmos, cultivate a limitless heart, above, below and all around, unobstructed and without hostility or hate whether standing, walking, or lying down. Sublime abiding here and now.

More bad news - world economic markets in chaos. Dow drops 800 points, then recovers a bit. Below 10,000 for the first time in years. Success of bailout uncertain. More panic as ant-like humans try to figure out the percentages. Uncharted territory! Economic meltdown! Rough ride ahead and presidential election thirty days away. A dirty and desperate John McCain wallows in shit with his VP choice Sarah bitch. The prophecies are coming true, the only ones I've ever had the slightest belief in. Will 9/11 be remembered as a prologue to the new Dark Ages? Is it the end of times? I've always scoffed at such notions, but I fervently hope so. Let it come down!

Ah yes, the prophecies...

10/7/08

Bad news continues. No one knows quite what to do, as though the momentum of failing global economies has taken on a life of its own, defying any single or combined strategies to stop it. Deep global recession, if not depression now seems inevitable. Obama-McCain second debate tonight. Obama could score knockout punch to an increasingly enfeebled McCain. Obama must win the presdidency as a prelude to stabilizing global turmoil. McCain/Palin? An unspeakable nightmare. America falls into the gutter. God, what times these are! A confluence of forces and events that will change the world forever. And right on schedule for the 2012 global transformation. I wish Terrence McKenna were alive to see it. I have never seen the lines between good and evil more clearly drawn. I rather like watching it unfold here in rustic Peru. It is truly a fitting place to be as American styled economics and politics unravel and begin, perhaps, their final descent into oblivion. Even if it means personal ruin for me, I hope it happens. Time for The Breaking of The Vessels! Time to bring back the sanity and renewal of the Green Corn Ceremony! I am a world citizen, not an American citizen. I look forward to the new age of global unity in government, economics, ecology, art, science and spirituality, a shared, inclusive human destiny and purpose. A telepathic global awareness. The coming forth of oneness through the Gaian Mind. No countries, borders, armies or insane hegemonic ambitions. But only if the good guys win? Or will it be a natural, cosmic transformation in which only progressive imperatives are subsumed. Will it be a truly evolutionary change or a step backwards into witch hunting and internecine clan warfare, leading to ecological collapse and loss of species diversification? Will the good guys win? Or is this just another utopian boondoggle?

11:30PM
McCain screwed up big time tonight. Referred to Obama as “that one.” He is finished. Only the dirtiest, stupidest Americans will vote for him now. Dow tanked again today, down 500. So, good news, Obama will surely triumph, barring some last minute dirty trick of all time by Republican swine. Bad news, economy has its hooks in me.

10/8/08

Sixth straight day of decline in the stock market. World wide recession is now predicted. Are we approaching the tipping point? How nice, for now, to be in cheerful, colorful Cusco. I can live with less if I have to. Travel over the past twenty years has taught me that. I never trusted this boom and bust American economy, much less American politics, foreign and domestic. They always pander to the worse in human nature and indeed it has been the shitty dregs of Wall Street that has brought us down. They and their shitty underlings and the stupidity and greed of the American people. The people is a great beast, as one of the Founding Fathers once put it. Madison? Jefferson? Anyway I have no sympathy for them. It would do America a world of good to be brought down a notch or two or three. America: an up and coming third rate nation! Ha ha ha!

It's raining gently outside of my cozy little Hostel Familiar room. Today, wandered about with video camera. A few nice candid moments with Cusco street folks, then a full blown Cusco religious festival. The Virgin and the Saint carried before fully costumed dancers, each troop with its own brass, drum, and wind wood ensemble. Lots of fun and mummery as devil figures ran around grabbing and harassing anyone one they wanted. One flailed my legs with a rope whip and another grabbed me from behind and danced me crazily along, all in good fun. It was quite a spectacle and I got some outstanding shots. The color, sound, fury and just plain good fun was bracing and uplifting compared to the bad news outside. Is this not one of the reasons for staging festivals like this? Same for Carnival. Drink, dance and be merry and let the troubles of the outside world go to hell. And the beautiful Peruvian women and girls showing ample flesh was the perfect spice for this occasion. A wild combination of Christian, pagan and indigenous traditions.

I can think of a dozen places I would rather live than America. Earlier in the day bought beautiful shamanic pouch from Kush's shop in San Blas. He is busy these days with his "ayahuasca tourism" gig and lots of people here in Cusco are getting in on the act. Anyone it seems, can hang out their shaman shingle and start serving up ayahuasca "ceremonies." Taped local couple in back streets who do just that. They were friendly and welcoming but would I trust them to properly administer to me while in full ayahuasca trance? Think I would stick with more experience practicioners like Kush or maybe the good shaman and his partner I met in Pisac.

10/9/08

Connie's birthday. Sent her an email.

8:40PM

Desperate, dire news. Stocks tanked again today, a 679 point plunge. Economies are collapsing all over the world. I have always tried to be optimistic at times like this but not now. I think world wide economic collapse is imminent, ushering in god knows what. Iceland appears to be the first country to belly up. Forces have been unleashed that no one can control or stop. Here in Peru, people seem serenely indifferent. I of course, face personal ruin. Rough, rough ride ahead.

10/10/08 10:00AM

Economies continue to collapse the world over as panic selling sets in. Dow fluctuating wildly. Some experts give only to the end of this weekend for world governments to come up with a plan to head off a worldwide wholesale depression and collapse. My own personal savings would almost certainly be wiped out. The nature of the forces spreading through the world appear to be karmic as well as economic. Economic forces can be ameliorated to some extent; karmic forces are implacable.

2:00PM
Hit the Internet for six hours straight and watched in disbelief as American and world markets continued to collapse. Meanwhile, McCain has descended into race baiting and hate filled inflammatory rallies against Obama. He is creating a unique place for himself in the history of American infamy. Never in my life have I witnessed a more disgusting fall from grace. There won’t be much of the old man left after the election which he will certainly lose. My own status in this debacle is sure to be dire. I have lost many thousands of dollars from my IRA. Can’t bear to find out how much. Thousands. (Actually, it was tens of thousands.)

Beautiful day in Cusco. I probably shouldn’t have come. But now that I’m here, I don’t regret it. Here’s a video of the two Cusco hippies I met on a backstreet of San Blas, offering the ayahuasca ceremony. Shades of Haight Ashbury in 1968!

My predicament nearly: unemployed, broke, no health insurance, bad back, and economy crashing towards final ruin. Well, these are interesting times if I can just survive them into comfy old age. I have never felt so caught up in the play of historical events as I am now.

Cusco sure is a pretty little town after the tourists have left. Flowers, sunshine, smell of freshly cut grass. Home in a week to an uncertain future.

Hospeda Je Familiar, 253 Munay Wasi - my kind of place. Cheap, run down, colorful, of the people. Bright and sunny as only Cusco can be. Plan to rent a little scooter and explore more Cusco back streets. They are plentiful and mysterious. If only my pale white skin could turn coffee brown like the natives’. I’m happy to see some of the touts finding receptive tourists for their postcards and CDs. I don’t suppose they do so badly after all. Old Quechua grandmother on walking stick, stooped and imploring. No denerio? Smile and a shrug. Harsh sunlight at mid-day. Nothing casts a shadow. Policia Nacional Comisaria hover harmlessly about.

10/13/08

Rented simpler motorcycle for out of town explorations, i.e. Chinchero, Maras, and finally Moray. Chinchero, like Pisac, has been spiffed up to bring in more tourists. Picturesque as always but nothing new. Bought a beautiful old brass llama bell from pretty vendor Jualia. Gasped for breath (Chinchero at 13,000 ft.) to the amusement of the locals. Onward to Maras. I had forgotten how magnificent the plains and mountains are. Drove down the narrow streets of Maras lined with mud brick buildings and this time found the proper turn off for Moray. Long, bumpy ride down rutted gravel road, overshot Moray by a mile or so, turned back and arrived at last. Pretty cool indeed. Huge concentric terraced construct beautiful to behold, used as experimental agricultural station, each terrace representing a different micro-climatic environment to test crop viability. Walked around and explored it from different angles. Had the place all to myself. Another example of Inca ingenuity. Here's what I saw approximately:

Back through Maras, a timeless mud brick city, to Urabamba, a timeless, squat and unsightly city clinging to the haunches of the Urabamba River. Took wrong turn back to Cusco. Should have gone back through Chinchero. It's getting late and it's starting to rain. I begin a three hour cold and punishing return to Cusco. Before the light of day fades entirely, many beautiful sights. First of all, the sheer immensity of the landscape I am passing through. I have never felt more physically diminished by mountains, rivers, clouds and distant fields in cultivation. I fall into the bottomless vortex of these elements as I drive and experience a sort of delicious vertigo. Distant snow covered peaks glow a pale, unearthly orange in the setting sun, before all is plunged into darkness. I fly along anonymous roadways without much to guide me. The feeble, flickering headlamp of my puny little motorbike is just sufficient to guide me around precipitous twists and turns along the way until I reach Calca, a fairly large town and a near disastrous doggy encounter. I see him out of the corner of my eye on the left as I approach an intersection and suddenly the little fucker is heading right my way on a collision course. I feel a soft bump or two as he passes under the wheels, yelping in fear and pain I guess. Tough shit! I barely manage to stay upright and seated but keep the hell on going and so it goes for what seems like an eternity. I’m wet, cold, and worry about hypothermia but plunge on. Tailgated by busses and trucks, blinded by the lights of oncoming traffic, it all seems to be getting more and more treacherous. By the time I reach Cusco I am exhausted and shivering uncontrollably, so much so that I can barely steer the bike. I make one last desperate turn onto Calle Saphi and finally bump into the rental place where Jualio the proprietor is anxiously awaiting me. All is well as I get off sore and stiff and near frozen. I stumble across the street to my Hostel Familiar room and fall into exhausted sleep.

10/14/08

So today, Tuesday, I’m sick again. Got some of the godamned unsanitary local water in my mouth while taking a shower and now having filthy, mucousy, diarrheic shits and then vomited on top of that. Misery! By any standard of comfort, this has been a terrible trip. I’ve been sick and exhausted most of the time between adventures, but all and all worthwhile. Maybe one more trip to Ollantaytambo before I leave.

Stocks are up, yesterday and today over 900 points! But what can all these wild gyrations mean but more instability and uncertainty. Obama continues high in the polls thank God...

Warm and pleasant in the Plaza today. Ever since I overpaid for a shoe shine on my first day here all the shoe shine kids in the Plaza have offered their services "for only" 50 soles. Ha ha but I’m only that generous on my first day of arrival, in gratitude. Then I’m off the hook?

10/16/08

Sickness finally drove me to seek medical assistance for the first time ever in a foreign country. I was in such pain this morning I was practically crawling on all fours. Sharp, agonizing pains in the gut, dry heaving vomit of yellow bile while I’m shitting in my pants. The pits. Two pairs of underwear were so utterly soiled I just threw them away. Took taxi way across town to “Panamerican Emergency Hospital,” a very nice walk-in clinic. I am interviewed by an attractive lady doctor who spoke little English but I managed to say in Spanish, “mucho delorous“ while pointing to my stomach. They hook me up to an IV and soon I am relieved of both stomach pain and nausea. They give me a little plastic bowl to poop in for a stool sample but I can’t squeeze out a single drop! So, they give me a scrip for Cipro and send me home.

10/18/08

Back in Lima. Seven hour wait for flight to Mexico City, then another six hour wait for flight to Seattle. Milling about of local and international riff raff. Feel tired and crappy.

10/19/08

Mexico City Airport again after long and uneventful flight from Lima. I am in the cavernous main concourse hall. A bit cold and forbidding. Sounds echo and murmur into incohate white noise that envelops you, actually rather soothing, like the old Grand Central Station in New York City.

Here at last is the web site of the Thrangu Tashi Choling Monastery I visited during my visit to Boudhanath.

It was here that I was introduced to the extraordinary child Rinpoche, who sat on a throne in one of the secluded rooms of the monastery, and was attended to by elder monks. I do not know his name or who he is the incarnation of. I presented him with a khata which he placed around my neck. Alas, no English spoken. I asked for his blessing. I remember a child‘s hand placed lightly upon my head, then I bowed and departed.

The monastery is located down one of the streets leading away from the Great Stupa. It is a busy place; many monks and nuns coming and going. I was escorted about by one of the young monks after removing my boots, then sat and meditated in the beautiful shrine room.

A lovely Nepal memory, which I ponder to this day...

This is the mysterious city you've dreamed about but could never quite identify. Sparks of old incarnations flash everywhere

4/6/06 8:30 PM

Newark Airport

Waiting for my flight to Delhi. My first trip to India will not be particularly auspicious; I’ll only be there for fifteen hours or so. Still, a memorable passage into the lush and sensuous matrix of world spirituality. The land of the Upanishads, their immense sophistication, of Pantanjali, Hanuman, Krishna, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, moon faced Parvati, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Vedanta, oceans of sutra millenium ahead of their times in fathoming the vastness of the ages and the cosmos...as I dash madly for newly announced boarding gate with only minutes to spare and my first lesson in patience...run panting to gate, drop my CD player, batteries and CD fall out, beautiful little Indian girl helps gather everything up...pay attention for Christ’s sake...! Indian gate personnel are tut tutting and demanding to see passport, visa and boarding pass...try not to get rattled as I grope for all the foolish credentials required of one in this insane world...sigh of relief as I pass by the archons who guard their world against the vicious, violent, or just plain foolish and inattentive...finally about to take my coveted window seat but aged, respectable bapho claims it's his! He's a bit senile and cranky, he and his wife...my Indian father! We tussle a bit. "Sir," I keep repeating, "you're sitting in my seat." He waves his boarding pass about muttering God knows what. Should just have let him have it, this is going to be a long flight, an aisle seat would have been more practical. Anyway things get straightened out via fussy flight attendants and so am properly seated. Funny little wife sits next to me, she's fumbling with her seat belt (no English spoken here) so I help her get it fastened. Hear the mighty engines roar! And off we go, Delhi bound, a sixteen hour flight. Gods of India, have patience with me.

4/8/06

New Delhi Airport
A rough and tumble passage through India. Awaiting flight to Kathmandu after getting on wrong plane and nearly ending up in Kabul. Night approach to Delhi spectacular...an immense network of pulsating lights stretching to infinity in all directions...each point of light was flickering and subdued, giving off no more illumination than a lantern or camp fire...totally unlike American or European cities with their obscene glare...like flying over an encampment of some vast tribe, who had set their cook pots to simmering all at once, hinting at the profusion of humanity below.

First smell upon arriving like burning garbage and outside, a disheartening cloud of smog hovers over the entire city. Delhi at night: hot, smelly, chaotic. The airport touts snatch at you like piranhas, barely concealing their contempt for people of my standing and nationality. But what did I expect? Indeed, one of them says something like "this is India, this is the way it is here." It's all too much as I scuffle with the boys, my hands shaking as I try to light a cigarette while they look on in amusement. One enterprising fellow manages to get my baggage into his taxi and then promptly holds it hostage unless I pay him 35 bucks for a ride to a local hotel. I angrily protest, and after some shoving and harsh words, the baggage comes out and I'm back on the curb where I began. Finally end up in so-so airport hotel for fifty bucks a night, driven there by one not so tainted by desperation, "Kumar." Strange, wraith-like creatures swirl through the dusty, traffic clogged streets.

4/9/06
Flight to Kathmandu in rickety old Airbus 620. It rattles and groans as it taxis down the runway. Christ, I hope a wing doesn’t fall off! Upon arrival no one there from Hotel Karma to pick me up. I am accosted by a wiry, talkative fellow named Surya who offers to take me to Hotel Blue Horizon, where he works of course. He is precisely the kind of for-you-no-problem tout that I have come to distrust over the years, but it looks like it'd his way or the highway. So I reluctantly pile into his busted up mini-van. A curfew is in effect and armed police are on every corner. We pass through one check point after another, six in all, manned by smirking national police who demand to see passport and visa. Finally arrive at the Blue Horizon, which turns out to be the perfect place for my purposes anyway, down an alleyway just off the Thamel main drag, cheap and with an international clientele. I settle into a beautiful room on the upper floor surrounded by a garden and jungle-like tangle of trees and vines. Thousands of crows and talkative native birds whistle, call, croak, gabble and shriek outside.

Kathmandu in lock down. No one may leave or enter the city. This includes tourists like me who must remain within the confines of their hotel. So I spent a pleasant hour or so at the Himalaya Meditation Center just across the alley from the Blue Horizon. Meditated in their lovely shrine room with Mark, who runs the place and Drukya, a Buddhist nun from England. Mark provided the missing corollary to the Buddha's injunction, "of the spiritual path, better not to begin. But once you've begun, better not to stop." Why? To abandon the path, only to start again, perhaps many times, reinforces negativity. It exposes our susceptibility to doubt and lack of perseverance. This is, perhaps, an obvious, but invaluable teaching that bears repeating. So where does that leave me? I have retreated many times into my cloud of intuitions which have served me well but this is, perhaps, neither on nor off the path. Do not trifle!

So I have arrived at a troubled time in this troubled country. How I wish that this land of Shiva and the Dalai Lama could achieve peace as an example for the rest of the world. I am confined here for the moment at the behest of my hosts which is not so bad after all. Troubled world alas, here in Nepal, civil war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the whole fucking world at its own throat. And South America tilting, country by country, towards a huge socialist driven, anti-American block! Tough shit! I salute Evo Moralis in Bolivia and extend a guarded admiration for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela for standing up against this downward spiraling, ever more dangerous American hegemony, that it may not take the rest of the world with it.

So finally we are permitted to leave the confines of the hotel. I wander round in amazement through Thamel, camera in hand. All the store fronts are shuttered. The narrow alley ways are jammed packed with one little store front or shop after another, side by side with the dwellings of the impoverished, who live and work here. In due course, I meet up with a street full of angry, brick throwing protesters. Piles of garbage burn in the street. To my amazement, the police let me through their check point and I walk closer still towards the chanting, jeering crowd, but am turned back finally by a policeman who fumbles for the proper words:

Uprising! Demonstration! Danger! Go Back!

Okay so I turn around and head back the way I've come, only to meet another band of noisy protesters throwing stones and bricks and setting new fires in the street. Finally, the police, heavily armed and with shields and clubs in place, begin to advance. I hasten my retreat and the protesters melt away into back streets and hidden doorways. I head back to the hotel video taping scenes along the way

4/10/06
Awoke this morning to breathe more rarified air, after a night of bad dreams. The magic of this place seeps into you, displacing bad thoughts, bad dreams, maybe even bad karma. Long walk through Thamel to Durbar Square. Curfew lifted for a few hours and the good people of this place awake from their stupor and spill into the streets, which, formerly abandoned, are now roaring with human activity. I am carried along like flotsam on a wave of humanity that deposits me finally in an enclosure along the street to Durbar Marg where musicians are singing sacred hymns from a play book of sorts, spread out before them. I fumble with my recording gear. The first thing you see when approaching Durbar Square from Thamel is the magnificent Taleju Temple...

4/11/06
To Pashupatinath, arrive by cab, make the mistake of taking on a guide, slick and fast talking, he suckers me in. Not so bad though as he gives me the standard tour of this major center of Hindu devotion, and what a place! The old and infirm come here to be cared for and die - am taken to their version of "rest home," very simple and open to the elements in veranda-like settings where the elderly sit serenely about on mats and chairs, many of course in their dotage but beautiful and delightful, with smiles that would light up Tartarus.

When they die, the nearby burning ghats await. The family stands about as the body is consumed and then the ashes are swept quite unceremoniously into the Bagmati, a holy river that flows into the Ganges. This is as it should be. The family retains some small portion of the ashes for remembrance and that's it, no obscene wasteful funerals, grave yards or mausoleums. The caste system is in evidence here, the better born are cremated higher up the river amidst more tidy surroundings. I am shown the ghat where the royal family, assassinated two years ago, was cremated. This is a center of temples, stupas, and unending devotion, especially to Shiva, and monkeys slink and prowl about everywhere. Clouds of incense rise up through the hazy sunlight. Am shown the Mother Terresa center and hospice where the old and dying are lovingly cared for. I give a donation to the doctor/director, a good man, namaste. Finally pay off my guide who has become a bit of a pest, off you go, and return to wandering about. I am in accord here, even though resentful and unwelcoming eyes sometimes greet me.

My wanderings eventually lead me to the "Milk Baba," (Shri Ram Krishna Das.) I am invited to sit with him. I remove my boots and step into his tiny hut that overlooks the river. There is an ashram here and devotees and assistants wander by. In the guru's home are all his worldly possessions; a shrine, books and items of devotion, pictures of teachers and saints, household goods and a butane stove. Baba is a lovely, serene man in his seventies who has sustained himself on milk alone for twenty five years. He travels, has a world-wide following, and is scrupulously attended to by his devotees. He has braids of dread locked hair over six feet long which he wraps turban-like about his head. Don't know what he makes of me as he quickly sizes me up but is gracious. His movements are calm and precise. We exchange a few words; the search for the guru, the necessity of performing Sadhana etc. In a moment of awkward silence I am about to leave when he offers to make tea. I watch his precise movements and preparations with butane stove and utensils. Two pinches of tea, one large and one small are tossed with surprising vehemence into a metal canister along with milk and sugar. Water is set to boil as Baba reads from a devotional text, and at the proper moment, is poured into the canister to steep. And oh yes, he is a mantra meditation master. The tea is strained and poured into two cups and Baba hands one to me. Lovely, serene moments ensue amidst the fragrance of incense and devotional music played just outside. Harmonium, tabla and hand cymbals, the aching beauty of heartfelt song. So I sip the delicious tea, Baba reads, the musicians play, and magical moments of floating timelessness pass by. At the moment of leave taking I ask for Baba's blessing. I lean forward, he places a golden cord around my neck and murmurs mantric incantations in Sanskrit over my head. I make as gracious an exit as possible, bumping into things and overturning a canister as I back out , ah me thank you Baba, namsate. Outside, I sit with the devotees and listen to the beautiful music. Later, I join the inner circle where I am not much welcomed. That's alright, after all, who is this guy wearing western clothes and backpack with camera, I could not be more of an outsider much less a devotee...

The sacred and profane bump against each other and overlap in the most extraordinary ways here. In Boudha (more later) the sacred stupa is ringed about by shop keepers selling everything from Tibetan antiques to yes, Buff Burgers! In the dusty garbage strewn streets are always to be found a shrine to one god or another, be it Shiva, Vishnu, or Kali. Burning sticks of incense are found tucked away into the folds of an ancient trees at the intersections of streets clogged with cars, rickshaws, and motorcycles. Indeed everywhere old trees are transformed into temples that embrace within their roots an effigy of the prevailing deity. The dust and smog are a scourge. I have come back from trips hawking and spitting up a slimy brown mucous. Not good! I feel its ill effects as a burning sensation deep in the chest. Many go about with handkerchiefs about their mouths, perhaps I should too?

4/12/06
Journeyed to Patan today in the delightful company of Malika, a beautiful 28 year old woman from Naples I met at the hotel. She is smart, strong headed, and somewhat disdainful of the workaday Nepalese man or woman. We begin our trip to Patan in a rickshaw but the impracticality of this mode of travel becomes immediately apparent. So, at Malika's insistence, we continue our way in a cab. She is a bit mysterious, this lady, and very private. She will not, for instance, meditate with other people "too personal," she says. She is a Buddhist, does not drink, smoke or eat meat, so she is a bit scandalized when later I order a schooner of beer. We take the usual tour about Patan's splendid Durbar Square. As I feared, the presence of another distracts me from a closer examination of the sights and sounds of Patan. No time to sit and ruminate, which is essential to my understanding of a new and exotic place, so will have to return.

Malika (pronounced Mah-LY-Ka) is a delightful conversationalist even with her limited English, spoken with beautiful Italian inflections. We are shown a hidden court yard where religious ceremonies are performed, courtesy of a little old wrinkled trickster who giggles a lot, and the spot where animals are routinely slaughtered (bulls, chickens, ducks) which does not accord with our Buddhists sensibilities but...? These are the ways of a timeless Hindu spirituality, though it does seem to violate the Hindu principle of ahimsa. Within a court yard that was once a part of the royal palace, we are shown a big circle drawn in the blood of a sacrificial animal, signifying I know not what.

And so it goes as we wile away the afternoon, taking tea in a tiny tea shop and conversing amiably with the proprietor. We have lunch on a terrace with a panoramic view of the square. Later we observe the local women gathering water in big plastic and metal jugs in a sunken courtyard, reached by steps, from gargoyle-like stone spouts. I videotape the scene and give Malika my camera. We wander about recording this scene of water gathering, perhaps their only source of clean water, and again, perhaps understandably, we are not much welcomed.

And so, back through the traffic maddened streets to Thamel, where we part, a bit disillusioned with each others company. I have a feeling that this beautiful woman, private and strong willed, is use to sampling the company of others who strike her fancy, only to depart abruptly when it pleases her.

4/13/06...the Nepali new year

To Swaybunath, the Monkey Temple. Extraordinary in every way.

Arrived in rickshaw, which was not so smart a choice. I end up jumping out and helping the driver push his machine up steep and winding streets. Arriving at last, I ascend the many steps to the temple in a dream like trance. I synchronize my walking by silently chanting om mani padme hum over and over again deepening the trance and filling me with a quiet euphoria. Scenes along the way: the old, the sick, dying and wasting away souls seeking, perhaps, a final benediction by making pilgrimage to this place; scantily clad children, nursing mothers, holy men in flowing Tibetan robes that appear out of no where who place a holy mark upon my forehead. Sounds heard: buzzing crowd noises, children playing, chanting, bells ringing, chattering monkeys...pay my entrance fee and climb the final steep stairway.

First thing I do is turn the three big prayer wheels, and then begin my walk around the stupa, spinning numerous smaller wheels, set back in niches, five or so to a niche. Made of bronze, they are worn and polished from the touch of numberless fingers. The circle of devotees is packed! New year‘s day is thought to be particularly auspicious. I rub up against the impoverished and well heeled alike who place small twisted ropes of burning incense into cups just below. This tight circle moves slowly clockwise and my body and clothing are suffused in clouds of incense. There is chanting, incomprehensible chattering, the ringing of bells. Parents lift up their children so they too can spin the wheels, and I, with half closed eyes repeat the mantra and benedictions, spin each individual wheel and bow at larger niches containing images of the Buddha. There is jostling, laughter, and much good humor as we make our slow way around the stupa with the all seeing Buddha eyes gazing down. There is so much more here then can be taken in on a single day. You walk, chant silently, and let the powerful energy of this place uplift you. Balconies behind the stupa offer up stupendous views of Kathmandu, befouled by leaden colored clouds of smog and dust. The trance state melts away before more worldly interests. I photograph and video tape the circumambulation of the stupa, holy men reciting from texts, devotees praying and lighting more incense. On it goes into the afternoon. Many hawkers of singing bowls, statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, prayer beads and prayer flags, thankas, Gurka knives and hand held prayer wheels. One face stands out amongst the others, the face of one with authentic heart...

Saran Shahi, who is to become my friend, beckons from the doorway of his shop and I go to greet him like a long lost relative. He manages well with the English he has picked up from tourists and is patient with my occasional incomprehension. Not once have I observed a shadow of anger or calculation cross his face. We fall into relaxed conversation and he plays me the music of Anil, his brother, an excellent classical - fusion guitarist. Nepali folk music set to the rhythms of tabla, djembe, flute and vocals. Excellent! I buy both of his CDs.

Anil Shahi
Later that evening I am honored to share dinner with Saran and his wife and two children, a son nine years old and daughter, fourteen. We enter through a doorway and squeeze past a huge motorcycle in the stairwell that is apparently leaking. There is a strong smell of gasoline. Their living quarters are a single room with a recessed place in the back that serves as kitchen and hearth. Saran and I converse together as his wife, who speaks no English, prepares dal bhat. I am provided with a spoon while Saran and his wife partake sumptuously with fingers.

Saran's a hard working dude, heartbreakingly so. Every morning he awakes at six, walks the entire distance from Thamel to Swayambhunath, then climbs up those innumerable steps to his shop. He does not complain. His two prized possessions are a color TV and a CD-DVD stereo system. The small space they occupy is illuminated by a single fluorescent tube. There are two beds, one for Saran and his wife, the other for his two children. As Saran and I talked, I could see flames leap suddenly as Saran's wife lit the butane stove. Shadows danced briefly on the walls and then vanished. These are small quarters indeed for four people. They are well managed but Saran confesses to the strain of no privacy. His kids are like two restless cubs. Saran's wife (alas no name) defers to him but is not subservient. So unlike Morocco where I never once laid eyes on Rachid's wife, cooking a meal for the boys in heavily curtained off kitchen, in anonymity... And so it goes...

Dorje

4/14/06
To Boudhanath. Strong Tibetan community, young monks and nuns in their characteristic maroon and yellow robes come and go with serene indifference. I do the circumambulation same as Swayambhunath with lovely Tibetan women in native dress. Their movements have a grace and precision that comes from a lifetime of devotion. Incense openly burns in sacred bowls beneath each prayer wheel placed there for that purpose. Clouds of incense waft upwards suffusing the pilgrim amidst chanting and ringing of temple bells. As before, I walk around the mighty Boudhnath stupa spinning the well-worn prayer wheels and chanting silently.

4/22/06
In Bhaktapur with friend Saran. So many wonders. Arrived by mad man Kathmandu taxi this day after the king has effectively abdicated. Wandering about in wonder through quaint streets of Newari daily life...drawing water from ancient street wells, washing clothes and dishes, selling produce, scenes of beautiful children and bewizened old ones...again, I am in accord here. Museum showing exquisite artistry of old thanka masterpieces, sumptuous, infinite, the unashamedness of being human, or better yet, spiritual human beings leading good strong human lives amidst poverty and strife...only live your own myth and have faith in basic goodness, banishes bad dreams and self doubt.

Om! Let my limbs and speech, Prana
And all the senses grow in strength.
All existence is the Brahman of the Upanishads.
May I never deny Brahman, nor Brahman deny me.
Let there be no denial at all:
Let there be no denial at least from me.
May the virtues that are proclaimed in the Upanishads be in me,
Who am devoted to the Atman;
may they reside in me. Om!
Let there be Peace in me!
Let there be Peace in my environment!
Let there be Peace in the forces that act on me!

7/22/06
I am now officially writing "off the journal," that is, I have transcribed everything I wrote in my journal while actually in Nepal. What follows are impressions and mood patterns drawn from memory. They will include events not originally recorded and afterthoughts of certain events after a three month hiatus.

Besieged at the Delhi airport! I remember thinking Christ, even in Morocco, the touts were not this aggressive or downright menacing. I must have looked a sight, tired and bedraggled after a sixteen hour flight. It's hot and I'm itching with discomfort and annoyance. I'm surrounded by a crowd of sneering, unsympathetic hoodlums. That's when one of them says something like, "this is India friend, what did you expect?" Finally, a fellow named Kumar comes to my rescue. He's one of the boys but a bit more diplomatic. I accept his offer of $10 and away we go.

Disjointed memories, the best of which is my return to Bhaktapur at night to retrive my "missing" journal.

Irkulyen ist der heilige Bar von Kamtschatka...

The Schamanen, a sub-group of the indigenous Korjaken people on the Kamtschatka peninsula, have for centuries told of "Irkulyen," (spirit bear). This creature is said to resemble a gigantic bear and anyone who encounters it meets with misfortune. Kamtschatka is very isolated; up to the fall of the USSR, only a few foreigners were allowed to travel there. But the Schamanen firmly believe in the existence of this bear. The Swede Stan Miner, one of few foreigners allowed to move freely about Kamtschatka, has worked for over forty years to prove the existence of this animal. He found gigantic bear prints, at least three times larger than a brown bear’s and estimated to be over a ton heavier. The US zoologist and bear expert Paul Ward considers the existence of Irkulyen probable. The description of the animal resembles the fossil finds of "Arctodus simus," a carnivorous bear of the last ice age that reached a length of over two meters as a fully mature adult. It occurred mainly in the northern Americas. Small populations of this species of bear might possibly still be found, particularly since Kamtschatka is largely unexplored.

Coming soon, Bear Pen Creek Chronicles, with pictures. Irkulyen lives...

Here's another project I'm working on. The vast catalog of Mayan glyphs, many still undeciphered, lend themselves beautifully to coloration. Here's a sample. Eventually, I will post an entire sample sheet of all my colored glyphs. Here's another:



The glyphs will stimulate your design instincts. Using Photoshop and Graphic Converter, the variations are endless. I've worked for hours on a single glyph, getting the colors and filter effects just right. Someday I will render them as 3D virtual objects that can handled and viewed from different angles.

Hypothetical future society communicates universal archetypes/ideas through use of Rubic's cubes and Mayan glyph flash cards as per Herman Hesse's Glass Bead game.

A fabulous glyph catalog can be found here.

Watkins Glen New York
The Dead, The Band, The Allman Brothers. Biggest outdoor concert of all time. I was there. That's me to the far left under the tent. Well, maybe. A day and a night with 600,000 freaks...Read more at:

Summer Jam 1973

Reviewer: miguel
Subject: Summer Jam

It wasn't Woodstock but...
it was the next best thing. Heard about Summer Jam as I was hitching to Montreal, July '73. Arrived there and camped out on Mount Blanc and then next day headed back down and stuck my thumb out for Watkins Glen. Arrived early in the morning and walked the five miles from town to the concert site, there were freaks everywhere! Tipped toed over numerous sleeping bodies to within 50 yards of the stage and woke up the next morning to Jerry's soulful guitar. The next few hours were filled with the most amazing live music I've ever heard. And yes, they all jammed at the end, is there a recording of it somewhere? All I know is that this is one of my most treasured memories. I think the 60's really ended at Watkins Glen that weekend ah me!......

...posted for no other reason

Okay, here they are. Just what the world has been waiting for! All my travel journal ramblings from 1989 to 2005. Comments and emails welcomed.

European Journal

3/10/89

The wanderer within comes forth!
Up to this point, you've done every thing that was to be done. You got a job and rented a house and had dozens of people tramp through like so many undone pilgrims. You've broken bread and drunk lots of wine. You've enjoyed scant pleasures of the flesh that evaporated like tenderness. You've planted a garden and stoked the hearth. You've taken in the stray cat. You've paid the bills one day ahead of the turn-off notice. You've consoled the women next door who lost her son and then her husband. You've pushed a quartz crystal into the crotch of a stick and nailed it up on the roof for good luck. You've gone back to school. You've started to run, fast, meditate and then quit. You've walked down to the water at night, in the rain, and looked out at the dark shore beyond. And look here! The supreme and shameful token of your sloth: your ass has worn a hole in the rug where you've sat watching TV!

3/20/89
I hardly feel like someone about to undertake the (1st) journey of a lifetime, a freewheeling tour across Europe. I am morose, sluggish, practically depressed. It has to do possibly with the part of me that hates to surrender the familiar, comfortable surroundings carefully cultivated over the last ten years. A feeling of resistance and distress knots the stomach and clouds the outlook. A kind of leveling effect applied to experience: why the hell do anything? Here or there, it's all the same.

March 21, 1989

Departure from Dulles Airport

Airborne and London bound. Flight so far smooth and uneventful. Bear hugs at the boarding ramp for Dad and Doug, come back to us safely, amen. Watched out the window as the light bespeckled shore of Turtle Island slipped beneath me and gave way to vast black expanse of Ocean. Darkness outside all encompassing while inside this hurtling projectile there is warmth and light, polite conversation, food, drink, crying babies...

About an hour outside of Heathrow. Sun's up, clouds reflecting orange dawn light; the ocean, flecked-with-spittle in appearance. We are told it is raining in London. Breakfast is served. Tea, orange juice, bun. I don't believe any of the pretty English flight attendants are going to invite me back to their London flats. Oh well. Lisbon by mid-day. Over Ireland now, south of Cork. Rivers, farms, villages.

3/22/89
Lisbon - a mind-blowing assault on the senses that began with a reckless and diverting taxi ride from the airport. The ride to Pensao Ninho de Aguias was an astonishing tour of some of the older and stately, albeit crumbling parts of Lisbon.

Dinnertime. I take a stroll down Rua Dom Durate, which rapidly turns into about three other streets, all going in different directions. Narrow alleyways with steep steps lead endlessly upward toward colonial era buildings with red tiled roofs. I make my way to one of the local eateries, one of dozens along the way. I point to certain breaded delicacies and indicate how many I want, not really knowing what they are. The proprietor wraps them carefully - 350 escudos. Further up the street I turn into one of the narrow alleyways. On the first landing some kids are kicking a soccer ball around and there is a small, dark establishment selling wine. A pretty young woman waves me away from the bottled goods to the real stuff: vino tinto, stored in large oak casks, possibly a local or house brew. She draws off a liter into a used plastic mineral water bottle. I give her 200 escudos but she calls me back to hand over the 50 escudos in change. Back in my room, (atop a carpet and drapery store) I enjoy the delicious food and wine watching the street scenes below. Traffic noise, music, snatches of Portuguese.

Footnotes: Lisbon is the first truly foreign city I have ever visited. No longer in the good ol' U S of A! Whoopee and hallelujah! My impression of the Portuguese: proud, earthy, with warmth that extends graciously to the foreign visitor. Portuguese women are uniformly beautiful with (for the most part) dusky complexions, dark hair, and an easy predilection to smile. Men on the street stern faced, that gives way on the slightest pretext to open friendliness. One old man approached me as I surveyed a fabulous view of Lisbon from one of the many higher vantage points of the city. He, not a word of English and I, a few stumbling words of Portuguese and yet we managed to converse. He corrected my pronunciation and then spread his arms out towards the city below indicating the Castle, the Alfama, the Bairro Alto. We laughed, gestured, shook hands and took our leave.

3/23/89
A day spent wandering aimlessly. I'm beginning to love this place. It is the best possible city to begin an exploration of Europe getting use to the sights, sounds and customs of a large foreign capital where the people are friendly and unpretentious. The Alfama, a fascinating district of steep narrow stairways and that branch off from each other in totally unpredictable ways. I stopped and looked in amazement at the cave-like entrances to dwellings. The doorways and windows are veiled with lace-like hangings through which comes the smells of cooking, strange music, the soft (sometimes loud!) babblings of Portuguese. Children playing everywhere, the most beautiful and happy children I've ever seen. I stop to take their picture. They smile, mug and carry on shouting a few choice words of English with mischievous grins ("fuck you too!"). One little boy with a better than average command of English indicates my camera and watch and warns me to "be careful" while gently tugging at them, signifying their vulnerability to being ripped off. On landing after landing I see the same thing: children, young mothers washing laundry at the local fountain, old grandmothers watching from windows.

Earlier in the morning I walked through a more rustic district. Small flower and vegetable gardens dotted the landscape everywhere, vegetation spilling over into tiny dirt and gravel alleyways, everything saved from squalor by this unabashed closeness to the earth, to growing things and the trilling of songbirds, in fact, an almost paradisiacal arrangement of earth, family, and dwelling. The birds - there must be more caged birds in Lisbon than any other place on earth. They hang outside almost every window and balcony and they sing beautifully. My memories of Lisbon will always be associated with trilling of caged songbirds.

The Barrio Alto - another old part of Lisbon, a slightly larger version of the Alfama. Narrow winding streets, steep stairways, every street overflowing with humanity carrying on the everyday tasks of living. There is a strong sense of community, perhaps a shared sense of destiny as the inhabitants play with their children, converse with their neighbors, and carry on the job of providing for every (simple) conceivable need from their tiny storefronts and restaurants. Footnote: there is apparently a strong communist party presence here - I see communist slogans and graffiti everywhere.

Again, this area is saved from squalor by the sheer, uplifting spirit of the people who live here, their sense of themselves and their community. Their openness to outsiders is amazing. I snapped picture after picture under their tolerant gaze without complaint. The weather: three straight days of warm sunshine and cool nights. The food and drink are plentiful, delicious and cheap. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Portuguese patrons at a bar while feasting on fish, rice, salad, bread and beer, absorbing their language and ways, has been an education. Coffee comes in the Arab style, little doll house cups but very strong and stimulating.

Earlier in the day, lunch in the Barrio Alto, having just visited the tomb of Henry Fielding at the Englishman's Cemetery. The entrance was locked. I banged lightly on the large metal door and was ushered in by a little old man who at first seemed reluctant to let me pass. I entered and instantly all the sounds of the city fell away. A place of great restfulness and beauty towering cedar trees, palm trees and other tropical species, wisteria carpeting the ground with small purple flowers. Birds trilling, soft fragrances borne by gentle breezes. Found the resting place of Henry Fielding amongst the hundreds of other gravesites. Paid my respects after a fashion, gratitude for the feast of language he left us, his humanity and compassion. Returned to the outside world past the old grounds keeper who, it occurs to me, I probably should have tipped.

Lunch at the Flor de Estrela, one of the many neighborhood restaurants in the Barrio. Trutas e arroz e salada e pao. And good Dutch beer. A plain, working man's establishment. The magic of comprehension when you speak their language.

3/25/89
Leaving Lisbon via ferry across the Tagus River. Shady character approaches and offers first a golden ring (nao) and then a beautiful chunk of hashish, 750E. Tempting, but no thanks. Must have been the backpack and jeans, a kind of international releasing mechanism for underground characters to come forth and display their wares. "Mucho trouble, senior," I say and wave him off. He is persistent. "Nao, nao."

Tagus River quite polluted, a scummy grey-brown in appearance. As we pull away from the dock, I recall a dream I had the night before of Lisbon personified as a jealous paramour who refuses to let me go.... Adeus Lisbon, adeus, adeus.

(Last night, in the Pensao Gloria. I awake with a start to the sounds of doors being slammed as if in great anger, while a soft feminine singing arises up out of nowhere, now near, now far away.)

Out on the river, a dark cloud of smog quickly obscures the city and I realize how big it is. At the Barreieo station a short wait for the train to Evora. Walked along the shore of this bleak industrial area. A few small fishing boats and the ruins of a windmill are all that remain of a simpler existence. Train ride, with stops, to Evora. Mile after mile of cork and olive trees, an occasional orange or lemon orchard. One stop, at a tiny rural village, was like a snapshot of Portuguese country life. A small whitewashed house with red tiles, old man drawing water out of a well while another irrigated the adjacent gardens with a battered old watering can, old wife shuffling among the chickens, the area all about lush and green. I lean out the window taking pictures they smile and wave.

The countryside, once clear of the many cork plantations, reminds me of the American mid-west except for the occasional farmhouse with the ubiquitous red tiles. Gently rolling hills and fields as far as you can see on either side of the tracks, unmarred by power lines or billboards.

Evora - a fabulous medieval walled city with narrow, labyrinthine streets and whitewashed buildings. But first a strange encounter. Arriving late Saturday afternoon and running short of Escudos, I ask the French dame at the tourist center where I can change money. She points out a place next door, a run down looking establishment with shabby wooden steps. I am told to ascend and ask for "Mr. Mosquito." I do so and find myself in the realm of the moneychangers, glowering old men amidst dust and decay who regard me with suspicion. I feel foolish and out of place as I inquire after "Mr. Mosquito." I hear a cough and a shuffle of papers in the next room and there, seated at a long wooden bench, is the man I take for Mr. Mosquito himself. Stooped, white haired and unsmiling, he is counting over a pile of Escudos and making entries in a ledger. "Change money?" I ask and produce two U.S. twenties. Yes, yes, quite satisfactory as he nods and ruminates and then scribbles a figure on a small piece of paper: 8.080. That seems okay but just to make sure I make my own calculations on the same slip of paper and come up with 6.080. A mistake. He sees my figure and oh dear what an uproar! I'm trying to cheat him out of two thousand escudos and his offer promptly comes down to match my lower figure. "But you were going to give me eight! Hard currency monsieur!" He mutters French imprecations and waves me away. I grab my forty bucks and split.

Back out into fresh air and sunlight, I begin to explore this old, magical city. I head off towards Giraldo Square and without even trying, find the first genuine Roman ruin I am to set eyes upon, the beautiful Temple of Diana. Fourteen Corinthian columns support what is left of ancient stone lintel work, the whole edifice resting on crumbling stone steps. The upper portions of the temple catch the dusky orange evening light as swallows and sparrows, singing madly, flit between the columns.

I wander aimlessly as is my wont. One narrow cobblestone street leads to another, some straight, some curving away and disappearing. Whitewashed walls rise steeply on either side. An occasional doorway left ajar reveals a tantalizing glimpse of Evoran everyday life - tiny stairways lead up, sometimes down, to cramped but eloquent quarters; kitchen, dining and living room occupying a single, well appointed space. The upper chambers may lead to a balcony or a rooftop garden where small orange and lemon trees with overhanging fruit swoop down just out of reach.

3/28/89
The last twenty-four hours have been a real trip chuck full of the unexpected - but first to finish with Evora.

The twelfth century Se Cathedral, mid-morning Sunday. The sheer stone centerpiece of Evora. Stepped inside (before arrival of Sunday worshippers) and again the sensation of utter peacefulness, the falling away of mundane concerns. Vast, soaring space carved and shaped from stone, with barely a sense of containment, a quiet invitation to come forth out of your tawdry, cramped worldliness and fill these gigantic dimensions with peace and goodwill. Flickering candles illuminate iconography of Jesus, Mary and the saints. Took the usual tour up on part of the chapel roof to examine the ancient stone work and look down into the cloister, and then, via an ancient, spiral stone stairway, to the cloister itself. In one of the several turns down the stairway, you are in pitch-blackness, hands reaching out and touching stonework worn smooth from centuries of human contact. The cloister an ancient walkway surrounded by arches, inclosing a small courtyard with well.

An earlier visit to the famous "Chapel of Bones" at the Church of St. Francis. Not quite so ghoulish as I had been lead to believe, but definitely impressive. Numerous skulls and what appeared to be femur and tibia bones had been pressed into wet mortar, forming the columns, walls and archways of the chapel. Unfortunately, every skull within reach of the causal visitor had been desecrated with graffiti. Names, dates, and just plain rubbish had been inked and sometimes carved into the skulls, and some skulls appeared to have been chipped away by souvenir hunters. I could not resist the temptation of running a finger across the smooth cranial vaults and eye sockets of some of them. In less than fifteen minutes, my fingers had swept across the mortal remains of dozens of the deceased. "Our bones are here awaiting yours" seemed like a fitting riposte to all, both believers and non-believers alike.

It is time to leave Evora, marred as it is by commercialism and the tourist trade, but enough of the old city left to set the mind to contemplating opposite impressions: Evora, the name of a Renaissance virgin, and Saint Evora, black cloaked dowager lighting candles in the cathedral.

And so to the train station for a lengthy wait for the train back to Barriero, then south to the Algarve. Along the way, a spectacular tour of southern Portugal. Sandy loam and vast rolling grassland give way to weird scrub forests of pine pitched in sand, and finally to sods of deep earthy reds and browns. We pass through rural villages with names like Aquas do Moura, Pinhiero, Vale do Guizo, Lousal, Alvalade, Torre-Va, and finally, Funcheria. Along the way are the beautiful farms and haciendas of the Portuguese homesteader, the red tiled and white-washed houses and barns set upon hills overlooking lush valleys. There is a deep love here, as everywhere in Portugal, of the earth, the loving cultivation of the earth. Everywhere are to be found gardens, vineyards and orchards. Even in so appalling a place as the slummy outskirts of Setubal are to be found tiny vineyards and gardens set out along the railroad tracks, or anywhere space permits the putting in of cabbage, lettuce, peas and onions. In every village we stopped at were to be found an overflowing bounty of vegetation, neat rows of growing things, and always a small orchard, oranges and lemons practically incandescent against the background foliage.

At Funcheria, I share first class accommodations with a young mother and her two young boys. I am immediately aroused by the mother - her Portuguese with its many trills is more like music than speech. Why is it I think she is alone, separated or divorced, raising her two children by herself? Perhaps a manner she has, weariness about the eyes and mouth. Or several side long glances in my direction that linger too long, and a way of arching her back up out of her seat that I find deliciously suggestive. Or (more likely) these are merely the fantasies of a single traveling man who would like nothing better than to spend the night with such a woman. Asleep and in profile she is even more beautiful and it is all I can do to take my eyes off her. Meanwhile, the two boys engage in delightful monkeyshines, bouncing and cavorting, all a giggle and bubbling over with a warm and happy Portuguese. Out of their mouths, their native tongue is pure delight, and this is something I have noticed throughout. The Portuguese are an effusive, outgoing people, the young brash and naturally so. Older men gather in bars and side streets and engage in animated conversation. The women shout to each other from balconies while hanging out wash or just inside doorways of small produce establishments. The very old men gather in small groups, especially in public squares. They are more reserved, a small cabal, knowledgeable of old customs and ways, a lore past from elect to elect.

3/28/89
To Lagos. Arrive on the late train. There are no rooms to be found at this hour and I refuse to spend a lot of money on a hotel room. Back out behind the train station I find a field lush with grass and succulent-like vegetation. It’s cool and breezy, there's a gibbous moon, everything seems fine as I nestle down into my sleeping bag. Am awakened by rain. It's light and passes quickly, but every cloud that passes over leaves me with a face full of rain. I cover up with the tent flysheet, which helps a little, but by daybreak I'm pretty wet, not soaked but wet. I am accosted by a little old man who inquires if I'm looking for a room? 1000 E? You betcha and the next thing I know I'm being escorted into private quarters - a double bed, window, clean bathroom with hot water - a bargain in this town. I settle in and rest up, then head out for a little exploring.

Lagos - another old town - Prince Henry the Navigator launched his voyages of discovery from here in the fifteenth century. The center of town is totally given over to tourism - dozens of cafes, bars, and restaurants, tacky little gift shops - all overpriced. Would not have stayed here long if it had not been for the cheap accommodations. Glad I did - the scenery along the Atlantic coast is spectacular. High, steep lime and sandstone cliffs predominate. Huge piers of land jut out into the water forming caves, grottoes, coves and inlets. The abyss falls away on either side; one slip and you momentarily fly with the birds before smashing on the rocks below. I spend the day exchanging perspectives - climbing high up among footpaths and the crags of cliffs, then lengthy descents to the beach and rock strewn coastline. One stretch of beach leads straight into the diminishing light of day - evening lights of orange and yellow cast near perfect ovoid sculpted stones along the beach in a beautiful unearthly glow. I take off my boots and leap from boulder to boulder amidst the crash of waves, if only to hear the slap of my feet on their smooth surfaces.

4/3/89
Sevilla, Spain. How do you capture the essence of a great city in just a few days? All you can do is wander, ravished with wonderment, with only a perfunctory glance inside the guidebooks. They can point out thus and such, but for the solitary traveler, astonishment and delight are always a matter of personal unfoldment.

But, to finish with Portugal. Spent my last day there (3/31) in Sagres, or rather the environs thereof. Rented a small motorcycle and spent the day exploring country of unsurpassed beauty. The small country villages between Sagres and Lagos, villages with names like Hortas do Tabual, Figueira, Salema, Vale de Boi, Barao de St. Miguel, Raposiera, Praia do Zavial. All had a common quality of the surrounding country blending indistinguishably with the boundaries of the village; the country, the land spilling profusely over and across the boundaries of the village proper. Everywhere, the intense and loving cultivation of the earth. Wild flowers ran riot, their fragrance filling the air. Timeless scenes of villagers tilling the fields, herding flocks of goats and sheep, leading their beasts of burden through the narrow streets of the village. Here, as everywhere in Portugal, the dignified black-shawled old women amble through the streets filled with the cries of playing children. Heaps of manure and straw everywhere, donkey carts drawing this rich compost into the fields, the fields, as I have said, spilling everywhere over into the village. Paved roads turn to dirt and vanish into the surrounding greenery. The light of day, partly sunny, partly cloudy, conceals and then suddenly illuminates the red tiled rooftops of distant villages, a single tree, a single hilltop, then plunges everything back into a uniform gray. Flying down the highway on the whining little monster of a motorbike I have rented, I turn down dozens of little dirt roads that lead nowhere, but open up to vistas of lush rolling countryside densely carpeted with wildflowers. One of these roads leads down to a desolate but rugged shoreline along the ocean. Two parallel canyons have been cut from sheer rock into which huge waves crash with enormous force. One is drawn to such scenes of natural power and held fast. I stayed for over an hour, making feeble photographic attempts at capturing the grandeur of the place. Again, the sun would suddenly capture a distant sheer rock cliff and the manifestation of great natural power as geysers of seawater shot hundreds of feet into the air.

There are, sad to relate, scenes of modern encroachment. The little fishing village of Salema once consisted of a single steep street lined with picturesque little white-washed houses and a beautiful stretch of unspoiled beach. It is slowly being engulfed by high-rise condominiums, expensive European styled villas, and just plain ugly tourista crap. Some rich consortium of Europeans (mostly English speaking) discovered Salema and decided it was just a dandy place to despoil. They thought they could some how buy the beauty and tranquility of Salema and make it their own. The result is an ugly conglomeration that will never harmonize with the timeless spirit of this place. The villagers continue to fish for a living - their colorful boats lie along the beach and fathers stand by sons calking boats and repairing fishing nets, but their way of life is doomed. The single (and original) steep and balconied street of Salema commands a sweeping vista of the Atlantic that white, rich Europeans will one day own. It's a shame that such a place could not have been put aside as a national treasure, forever immune from the white European buck. Few things can resist the flood of big money its deadly undertow will pull down more than a few Salimas, an immemorial culture and way of life. I despair of a southern Portugal tidied up and Europeanized by tides of moneyed Northerners, who, to escape the smog and garbage filled landscape of their native lands, can do no better than visit the same misfortunes on impoverished cultures abroad. It was a relief to move on to villages where modernization was more in keeping with tradition.

But again, it is time to leave, time to leave Sagres, time to leave Portugal. Next day I take a bus back to Lagos. The Saturday open market is in full swing. All manner of items are being offered clothing, appliances, shoes, pots and pans, fruit and vegetables, heaps of dried beans, rice, fish a confused and delightful din of exchange, offer, and counter offer, the hawkers gathering piles of escudos as the bright sunny morning wears on. I wander around, watching and taking pictures.

I board the train in early afternoon for the last port of call in the Algarve, Villa Real de Saint Antonio. Along the way, more precious scenes of Portuguese rural life, perhaps the best I've seen so far. The afternoon warm and sunny, the air filled with the fragrance of orange blossoms. Green rolling fields filled with the fruits of loving labor, the soils of this region deep earthly reds and browns. Never far from view are the shores of the Atlantic. Outside of Faro are vast stretches of muddy flat lands, as far as the eye can see. Tiny figures of people can be seen digging for shellfish. I reach Villa Real and take the ferry to Ayamonte, Spain. The failing light of day scatters in ripples across the water and silhouettes the dark shore of Portugal. The white washed houses of Ayamonte glow like coals in the distance. Plunge into Spain, walking up and down the old streets of Ayamonte. I hear the distant strains of Spanish from shabby old watering holes along the waterfront. Out of the Centro and up high above the city, the crumbling remains of battlements from long ago wars with Portugal. It is dark, eerie and almost silent up here. Cool gusts of wind rustle through the grass and trees, the river below, a dark ribbon dotted with a few solitary lights. Stars leap out from a cloudless sky. I walk about with an idea of sleeping out. I'm tired, it's late, and my pack is wearing me down. Walk all the way back down, find nothing in the way of a room, walk all the way back up but take a different route; I now find myself in a large grassy field opposite the crumbling old church with a tolling bell that creaks like the spell of doom. Bed down exhausted in the tall grass and take my rest at last.

On to Sevilla, mid morning by bus. Am let out in the midst of teeming streets and simply plunge in.

4/4/89
In Algeciras, gateway to North Africa. On to Morocco tomorrow. Algeciras - a seedy, dirty port of call, transient characters from all over the world. Hustlers and hash dealers - the way they draw a bead on you from a street corner (the back pack and jeans again) and then fall into step just behind you, couching their pathetic little wad of goods in the palms of their hands and murmuring enticements. Dark, swarthy, beat, of indeterminate nationality. The main strip in town down by the water, with dozens of travel agencies, tour guide type businesses; little run down bars, cafes, and video game arcades in between, with sharp eyed déclassé youth waiting in doorways waiting to separate the unwary from their pesetas. There are heaps of garbage everywhere and the streets smell of sewage. Real armpit.

4/9/89
Back in Tangier after spending last four days in Marrakech, Fez, and Siddi Kacem. I'm in a seedy little pension just off the main boulevard in a room with a magnificent view of the city. The action, sights, and impressions have been intense and non-stop. Trips out of time and the modern world, i.e. America, Europe etc. valuable because they are irreducible to anything previously known or experienced or former schemata neatly filed away. They are better related in parts not necessarily sequential in time.

Hassan, who is to be my guide in Fez, boarding the train just outside of Marrakech - the studied politeness, the too winning smile and slick ingratiation "welcome to my country, welcome to Morocco!" the smile only occasionally disturbed by incomprehension or calculation, a hustler of course but gentle and so very smart, returning to our compartment later and making his pitch, "I hope to be your excellent guide in Fez!" With me are Blair and Heather, Canadian friends I met in Algeciras. Blair skeptical, struggling to be civil, asking pointed questions but unable to penetrate Hassan's practiced and polished demeanor, asking finally sensitive political questions which Hassan brushes aside with cool evasion and winning us over finally, quite an accomplishment in Blair's case, who has the novice traveler's suspicion of all things foreign to a high degree. Arrive finally in Fez, the station shabby and depressing, filled with all the local hustlers waiting for their catch of the day, staring at us, looking for a pretext (eye contact is sufficient) but angel Hassan leads us safely through the gauntlet. We're safe from aggressive come-ons as long as we are with him.

4/18/89
In Perigueux, southern France. A town of many contrasts. People friendly and patient with the stupid foreigner who does not speak French. But I am attentive; the language bubbles and flows like a spring freshet. The "new" city is still old looking, sometimes shabby, but mostly worn and smoothed over like old furniture, sooty and discolored, or literally dissolving away. The "old" city around the cathedral is, yes, genuinely old, Medieval or Renaissance looking and yes, older still with Roman-Gallo ruins, an old Norman archway, the remains of a Roman wall, temple, amphitheater and villa that once belonged to the Pompeys; the Vesone Tower, center of the ancient city of Vesuna, and the eleventh century church Saint-Etienne de la Cite. And most prominently, the Saint Front Cathedral, an immense Romanesque church with soaring, intersecting quadruple archways and four (five?) huge pendentive basilicas, the whole thing built of massive rectangular stone blocks. Its many interior perspectives look like something Escher might have painted, both staggering the imagination and uplifting the spirit - yes, all this and more in Periguieux, amidst clouds and mist in the hills behind the L'Isle River, turbulent and muddy after three days of rain. Yesterday and today, a little sun. The "old" city, well, it's been spiffed up a bit for the tourist and equipped with just the accoutrements every "old" city needs: boutiques, pastry shops, cutesy little pubs and restaurants and paved over (no shit) cobble stoned streets. For once, I would like to see a genuine slice of old Europe stand up and say "fuck you" to the tourist buck, which is impossible I know since old Europe no longer exists and her crumbling monuments persist and are maintained at the behest of the new and powerfully moneyed Europe and sheep herders and stone cutters are antique absurdities. Old Europe, thank God, still lives in the hearts of many Europeans. A walk down to the river in the evening is confirmation of that. This particular stretch of the river is delightful. A well-worn path runs down one side through thick grass and vegetation. Men and boys have come down to the edge of this swift moving river to cast their fishing lines. They strike poses that are utterly relaxed. Many have brought their dinners with them - bread, wine, sandwiches, pickles and olives. Further down, and on both sides of the river are large tracts of bottomland transformed into a patchwork quilt of little gardens beautifully and lovingly tended, a by now very familiar sight. Again, the magic of the evening light casts a warmth and tenderness about these scenes that plays tricks with the mind. I could be anywhere, at any time in Europe. The angler baiting his line, the old man with a wheel barrow full of compost and straw, mothers and babies, squealing children, an old bum with his pack, all have come down to the river to watch the lights kindled and extinguished and rekindled in its eddy and wash, to smell the rank smell of old silt laden waters and to hear the last of the doves crying in groves of lilac.

4/30/89
Four days in La Spezia, exploring the Cinque Terre. I have found paradise, frigged a little by tourism but still a deeply lived, immemorial life style. Wandering through the tourista crap in the lower part of each village, you move up through a landscape of almost hallucinated beauty, with mountains, the sea, the heavens, and the works of man in near perfect harmony. These medieval fishing and farming villages have cultivated the same plots of earth for over a thousand years without exhaustion. Indeed, the vegetation, both wild and cultivated, spills richly down into the village itself. At last I have found the essence of old Mediterranean life that I had hoped to find; sweet, vigorous, serene, and assured. Alas, I cannot live here. All I can do is follow tiny foot trails up into meticulously terraced mountains and climb higher still up ancient stone step ways, some chiseled into solid rock, and gently trespass in the exquisite gardens and vineyards found everywhere. No one complained. They saw me gawking about and went on with their business. These were the real villagers, not the souvenir hawkers below. The typical Cinq Terre village tumbles out of canyons to the very edge of the Mediterranean. A fresh water stream runs down through each canyon or gorge, where, in town, it is conducted by causeways to the sea. Water is drawn from these streams to irrigate the extensive vineyards cultivated in terraces on the hills and mountains surrounding the village. Small footpaths and ancient stone step ways lead up, through, and around the terraced vineyards, sheds, cisterns and other out buildings. Up through the central gorge, the vegetation is wild and lush, and the stream forms numerous waterfalls. In several places old stone archways form bridges over the gorge. Everywhere you climb, there are panoramas of sea and mountain to delight the eye. The village itself rises dramatically up out of sheer rock, nestled within the curve of sea and canyon, the terraced vineyards spreading out or falling away on the surrounding hills.

5/7/89
In Paris, at the apartment of Blair and Heather already mentioned, friends I made in Spain and traveled with through Morocco. Been here since the 4th, early, arrived from Milan. A city of wonders, a vibrant, polyglot city with numerous ethnic groups represented, indeed a vast multi-complexioned populace on every street corner. Heather and Blair do their best to show me around but I'm best as usual wandering around on my own. The Notre Dame cathedral is another exquisite, soaring medieval edifice, candles flickering within, music - organ and voice reverberates from morning mass. Light streams in through the famous rose windows, throngs of tourists file through the corridors and tramp up deeply worn marble steps to the tower above for a spectacular view of the city. The Seine is nearby. I walk up it to the Latin Quarter and walk the streets. Find the Eiffel Tower and yes, it is a very impressive structure but I forego the privilege of spending 47F to ascend to the top.

5/13/89
On Corsica, outside Ile Rousse. Well by God I'm camping out tonight. I'm in a rocky little cove outside of town. The weather cool and sunny. Got here by boat a few hours ago from Nice. I almost decided not to come to Corsica but once in Nice I figured it was to close to pass by. Nice was nothing, or rather a lot of over developed coast line characteristic of the Cote d'Azur, huge condos, apartment buildings, casinos - a sprawling ugly city only partly redeemed by a beautiful pebble and stone beach that curves out and away like a sickle. It's a relief to be here in the rugged mountainous beauty of Corsica. My original plan was to travel southward through the islands of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, but I'm cutting short the original itinerary and leaving Corsica by boat to Livorno or Genoa, and from there to Venice, down through Yugoslavia and finally into Greece. As the weather warms up and days dry out, I'll be doing more camping, hitching, and just plain vagabonding, as I dreamed of doing years ago. It's time to cut loose and see the rest of Europe from the less privileged perspective of a pitched tent. Also, though trains are fast and convenient, they pick you up in the busy middle of one city and deposit you in same in the next city. A lot of beautiful, old and very curious scenery flies by the window. And of course, I'll be saving money

5/14/89
In Corte, within a splendid scene of natural power and beauty. A Corsican mountain river swollen and roaring with the waters of spring melt off.

5/18/89
Spent superb night under the stars beside an over hanging rock ledge outside of Ile Rousse, soft grass, Big Dipper directly over head, swoosh and murmur of the Mediterranean lulling me to sleep. Next day hitched a ride to the mountain town of Corte and spent several days camping out. 1st day wandered around Corte. Huge craggy mountain peaks and ledges visible everywhere, many wreathed in cloud and mist. Climbed up to the old citadel that crowns the old city for a great panoramic view of the countryside. The Tavaganani River in melt off is audible everywhere, its waters a beautiful transparent turquoise blue, cold and sweet tasting. The Corsicans are definitely the toughest cookies I've met yet in Europe. Proud, rustic, sometimes gruff, but overall friendly and given over to animated conversation. On 2nd day took a walk literally up into the clouds, hiked up the Restonica Gorge along a road chiseled out of sheer rock (as are all the creations of man in this region). Spectacular scenery everywhere, the Tavaganani crashing and frothing over huge rocks and boulders. Higher peaks still capped with snow, many small melt-off fed waterfalls falling hundreds of feet down sheer rock cliffs.

6/4/89
Where am I? Volcanic-alchemical caldera of an island some take for Atlantis. Prodding ancient lavas in the scorching heat of mid day for rare volcanic mineral powders, rich oranges, yellows, reds, (deep magenta reds) olive, olive to brown, dark brown. Stumble later along the late afternoon lava cliffs of Vourvoulos Beach, lava and volcanic ash cliffs carved into exquisite sculptural forms by wind and water. The old ones of this isle (Santorini) weave immemorial customs and lifestyles amidst the mindless, materialistic crush of western tourism. Donkey trains bearing straw, produce, oil, necessities, led by peasant mule driver riding side saddle threads his way up the narrow village streets around and between cars, motorbikes, tourists. You can hear the jingle of their bells and the clomp of hooves from a distance. Mule driver whistles, calls out, and snaps the whip lightly as his team advances. They are mostly ancient. Their way of life will be gone in another generation of finger snapping Grecian youths who look to the west and America, rock & roll and fast food and material comfort as the new standard to admire and emulate. Santorini is an exquisite, blasted out volcanic desert island made fertile by a millennium or more of painstaking cultivation. The natives are tough cookies alright, turning volcanic ash into vast fertile fields, growing grapes, olives, and produce; raising goats, chickens, sheep, lading their tables with a rich harvest from this intensely elemental, earthly place. Puppy tourists, you have no idea! (their bemused looks seem to say) coming here with your stupid puppy assumptions of comfort and prosperity! Where's my chilled wine? No ice? Give me some of this, give me some of that! You speak a few words of English, good for you! In a few years you will all speak our language and embrace our customs as your own. There is no other future. I can't blame the few angry ones, the few reticent ones. The familiar, sly ingratiation masking resentment and yes a kind of fuck you, you rich American pigs with your video cameras and spreading waist lines. (I'm getting drunk on Santorini home brew. Sweet, musty, potent red wine). Overhearing Americans talking who might just fucking well have stayed home in fucking America, their stupid twaddle about how Europeans owe us something! How they should be more honest! More polite! More civil! Meanwhile, our demands tax their supply and fill their streets and villages with an ugly clot of shoddy, made-for-tourists dogshit! In Tinos an unforgettable sight: a bloated tourist puppy getting his plump pink arms and shoulders rubbed down with sun tan lotion by his bloated puppy wife. Ah Christ! His shit eating squint-eyed grin of ecstasy! His smirking little wifey! By the end of the day, they both look like a couple of steamed prawns, burned and miserable. And I bet they didn't even leave Tinos Town!

High above Tinos, the old ones still press the olive and the grape, bake bread in stone hearths, tend the livestock, re-plaster the ancient whitewashed walls of their medieval villages, dance the old dance steps in the shady central squares, and doze at mid-day during siesta. Rented a motorcycle and rode high into the hills to see just this and hardly met a soul. Those few I met submitted warmly to my requests for photographs. I've taken over a thousand goddamn pictures since Lisbon! I have no idea of what I've got. In Tinos Town, my camera was stolen in the goddamned Bank of Greece of all places by (I think) employees of the bank. One moment of forgetfulness and it was gone, baby! I've had bad luck with cameras, one broken, one stolen, and finally I end up with a Kodak aim-and-shoot tourist puppy camera with fixed aperture and shutter speed, zero focusing options, no idea of what I'm getting now but it's better then nothing. Challenge: extracting high quality pictures from this primitive device. A few hours later, after losing camera and filing police report, my eyes beheld the Megalokhari, the most sacred relic of Greek Christian Orthodoxy, an icon of the Virgin Mary encrusted with jewels and pearls, housed in the Panagia Evangelistria. Here also are to be found the hanging silver chalice lamps with their single flickering candle, underneath which hangs an icon of the body part healed or the material possession given thanks for, in their dozens, a beautiful, shimmering spectacle in the dimly lit church. I bought a few specimens in several of the religious trinket shops below the church. But this is piety in a simple, straight forward manner, gratitude for physical well being and for children, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, even well running automobiles, rendered in a physically, universally understandable way, laid at the feet of the divinity and His intermediaries, with prayers and offerings. Icons everywhere of Christ, the Virgin, the Apostles, the old teachers and saints, beautifully illuminated in vivid colors and gold gilt (just the opposite of Islam with its prohibition against image making.)Greek Orthodoxy is perfectly suited to the Greek character: pious, passionate, volatile, reverent. There are hundreds, nay thousands of orthodox churches spread throughout the Greek Islands and mainland with their characteristic basilica and multi-tiered bell towers, blue domed and white washed. Rode high into village after village with names like Triandaros, Dio Hora, Potamia, Mirsini, and Steni Arnados.

From day book, Falatados village:

5/31/89
"On the Greek Island of Tinos, in the village of Falatados. I am sitting in the small, tree shaded square, where villagers drink, dance, and socialize. I have had my cup of strong Greek coffee and am awaiting lunch of salad, bread and retsina. It is mid day, cool and beautiful under the shade of the trees. The view before me is pristine rustic Greek Island countryside, terraced, sun splashed hills dotted with white washed houses and churches, a white washed village in the distance. White doves flash against the country greenery".

Back to Santorini, an island utterly blown to pieces by an ancient volcanic eruption, the same (some think) that destroyed Minoan Crete and the brilliant Minoan culture on Santorini (ancient Thira). Archeological museum shows the few, pathetic, brilliant fragments of their funerary rites, their handy work in pottery, marble, lavic stone, frescos and whatever was at hand to be fashioned into works of utility and beauty. The main island of Santorini curves away in a stony embrace of the ancient volcanic caldera (now an island called Nea Kameni) that created the original island and later blew it to pieces. Sheer volcanic cliffs rise out of the Aegean to spectacular heights. It's a crazy place to build a village, but there they are, white washed and strung out along the top right at the edge, in defiance of the next (possibly imminent) earthquake or volcanic eruption.

6/5/89
Of Venice, one is everywhere reminded of her faded past glory rather than her present beauty and charm, crumbling, faded palazzi on the Grand Canal, stately and colonnaded. St. Mark's Square turned into a vast back street warren of expensive shops: the sulphurous stench of the smaller canals deep within the city.

6/6/89
Stranded in Santorini. Delightful. Ferry to Heraklion cancelled because of bad weather. Must take 11:00 PM ferry to Agios Nikolaos instead. Meanwhile, here in the tiny port town of Athinios, nothing to do but eat and drink and watch my fellow puppies eat, drink and belch. Delightful. Piped in music from Zorba the Greek. Eating souvlaki and drinking good red wine. And now to linger here a bit. Bravo!

Befriended young American woman of Greek extraction by name of Demie (short for Demeter) from Washington DC. Young (29) attractive, we walk about Thira Town and talk up a storm, get kind of close and then bounce off each other the following morning at the youth hostel where we are both staying, she to a tour of the caldera, me to Vourvoulos Beach (again). Earlier, met Jill, young beautiful blond en route to Athens - Yugoslavia, from Baltimore. Wanted to travel with her and possess her, she seemed a little lost and vulnerable. Got phone number for future rendezvous.

The sheer, dizzying, multiplication of event after event; a face, a monument, a scintillating sunset over the Aegean, the incomprehensible babble of foreign tongues. Some of the Greek men down a few tables are playing guitar and singing - a kind of slow, sad, bittersweet strain of a kind I have not heard before in Greece.

6/7/89
Watching Howdy Doody and Buster Brown on early 50's box like black and white TV, what glimmer did I have that I would someday visit a place like Crete? In the early evening here in Heraklion, the bells from nearby Greek Orthodox churches chime, fall silent, and then chime again, a comfort, perhaps, against the coming uncertainty of night. At dawn (as I heard on approach to Agios Nikolaos this morning) they will chime again.

6/8/89
To Knossos, in the morning, after having viewed Minoan treasures at the archeological museum. In ceramic, painting, the fashioning of sacred icons and images, here was a people in touch with the swirling, ever playful, effusive flow of existence. In their frescos, the Minoans reveal themselves as a people of almost impeccable physical beauty, power and beauty combined with a childlike apprehension of the world about them. Not one physical representation shows a Minoan scowling in contrast to say, the Mayan codices or the rictus of otherworldly obsession in Egyptian painting, or even, as in Greek and Etruscan painting, the serene enigmatic smile, but a continence of wide eyed wonder and simple smiling pleasure in themselves and their world.

6/9/89
In Matala after nice bus ride from Heraklion. Well, if this ain't a pretty slice of paradise! Got room with complete bath including hot shower for 1200 drachmas. That's about as good (& cheap) as it gets in this former hippie hangout. Matala built at the end of a deep cove on the Mediterranean. Blue-green waves roll and crash. Took my first swim in these waters, sandstone cliffs tower all around and to the right are the famous Matala caves - home to the 60's flower children now abandoned but picturesque. Later hiked up over near barren, moon-like landscape to Red Beach for some pleasant nude sunbathing. Beautiful young women, children, a gay couple, all floating serenely in the buff, a very pleasant, suspended moment of innocence, when all the horrors and stupidities of the outside world fell away. Crete looks to be, perhaps more than any other place I've seen, the pure elemental essence of Gaia, a place hot, dry, and harsh and yet incredibly fertile; grapes, olives, oranges, flowers and herbs grow in profusion; another near perfect conjunction of heaven, earth, and sky. Man is not outside this formula here but an integral part; tending, nurturing, and cultivating. Heraklion of course is a malignancy unto death, its gritty stench flows beyond its boundaries to besmirch the countryside with smog and noise, unto the very precincts of Knossos and beyond while here in Matala, the late afternoon light strikes the higher cliffs and hills and rebounds into a pure blue sky. Streamers of light fall obliquely through the hyacinth blossoms before me. Am now eating Greek fast food at its finest - gyros, French fries, olives, red wine. Late afternoon in Crete - it's a good place to be. The hyacinth blossoms look like an impressionistic painting.

6/11/89
Another day of random exploration, this time to as many of the small mountainous and coastal villages as I had time to visit. Main visit was to the small fishing village Lendas (ancient Lebena) where the beautiful ruins of a temple to Asclepius lies just behind the village. I counted twelve pillar bases and a number of broken and toppled marble pillars. Two remain upright, enclosed by a fence. A spring, said to have had healing powers, once flowed here. Good Christians have built a little church on one of the foundations of the temple. Got more powerful dirt bike to negotiate rough mountain roads. Drove high into the hills for breathtaking views of mountains and valleys, plunging towards sedate plains, many fertile and in cultivation. Drove into hill and mountain villages some, it seemed, barely clinging to existence, others bravely trying to modernize in ways that were unsightly if not down right ugly, with numerous box like concrete structures, mostly unfinished. But the old rural ways and rustic village houses and livestock enclosures were still very much a part of every village. Smell of manure, black-shawled old ladies knitting or baking bread, the men sitting in the tree shaded square with café, drinking, playing cards or backgammon and loudly conversing. Villages with names like Pitsidia, Sivas, Pombia, Petrokefali, Antiskari, Mires. Watershed patterns very conspicuous in a twisted, turning and folded pattern of valleys, gorges, and ravines, giving the landscape as a whole a starkly rough-hewn appearance. Towering solid rock precipices everywhere, bare in most places or covered with a tough, desert-like scrub flora, much of it in flower, fragrant and beautiful. Indeed Crete is a splendid desert paradise; one only needs to retreat into the shade, anywhere, to escape the heat. Villagers look on with curiosity as I stop and walk about. Some (the elderly) wary and reticent of outsiders intruding into their midst on loud, whining motorcycle. But friendliness comes quickly with a smile and a nod in their direction. I take photos as discretely as possible, pay for my indiscretion by being waved angrily away (as in Lendas), or showered with Greek expletives (as in Rethymnon), my only rational being (as I gently trespass in Antiskari): this is all passing away, rapidly and slowly, even as we sit here on a quiet afternoon (as in Sivas) quaffing raki and eating peanuts and slices of cucumber, drinking a toast to the sweet old man who refills my glass, this, as I say, is passing from the world and I wish only for the privilege of bearing away some faint, inadequate trace of it before it is gone altogether. The old man in full Cretan male get up approaches me in a nameless mountain village, comes forward painfully, white mustachioed, bent; his eyes meet mine from a distance. As I raise my camera, he stops, smiles broadly, waits for the shutter to trip, then grabs my hand warmly as we pass, with warm salutations in Greek. The epic narrative of this island, in heroic or other suitable verse, awaits to be written, taking altogether history, culture, geology, climate, flora and fauna; in short, the rocky substrate and all that moves and grows upon it in an endless, immemorial flow; past, present and future.

6/14/89
In Plakias, after Rethymnon. At the beach. Beautiful, bare breasted women, their breasts bobbing and swinging as they walk. Rethymnon touristed out - crowded, expensive, noisy. Back to the simple conjunction of land and sea. Two small mountain villages, Myrthios and Sellia, look down from the north and east. More explorations tomorrow. Today given over to lazy swimming and sun bathing on a large beach surrounded on three sides by craggy mountains and cliffs. Have taken refuge under scrub cedar, surrounded by sandstone blocks and smoothed over stone. Surf. Soughing wind.

6/20/89
Plakias, trieste Plakias. Later.

Arrived in Sparta, south central Peloponnese after journeying from Kastelli, Crete to Neapolis. First thing I saw after disembarking from bus was a young boy with a withered left foot, just the kind of child the ancient Spartans would have exposed on a mountainside. Modern Sparta is a squat, unsightly sprawl, in many ways a typical Pelopponese city. But there is true character here and intensely lived lives. Got room and had dinner, then followed the signs at dusk to ancient Sparta one kilometer north of town. Not much left to see, a few crumbling walls, the remains of a small agora, the eroded and tumbled down remains of a theater said at one time to have been the largest in Greece. But impressive because this after all is Sparta, one of the most formidable military powers of ancient times and the nemesis of ancient Athens. All that is worth seeing is enclosed within an olive grove. It was quiet and peaceful, if not a little eerie in the failing light. Bats flittered overhead. There are no fences, no guards, no booths selling tickets to the precious ruins of Sparta. Everything is left quite open and untended. Returned to the modern city to watch the promenade on the public square. Hundreds of people young and old (mostly men) sauntering casually to and fro along the square or as "Lets Go" puts it, "evening strollers, all-dressed-up-with-no-place-to-go pace and, after a moment, pause, then retrace their steps". It all seemed a rather delightful sight, something you would never see in America, the casual warm socializing, children gamboling about.

6/21/04
Visited the museum in Sparta. The weird, marvelous votive masks; snarls, grimaces, devilish grins - the Spartans were definitely in touch with the irrational. Something cruel, twisted and primitive, the smirking and arrogance even as their society is crumbling. Numerous depictions of chthonic deities with snakes or just snakes in bas-relief. In complete contrast to the Minoans. No hint of wonder or playfulness or even the sturdy grace of the human form as in Greek sculpture but a dark, unswerving purpose.

Backlog:
1. Sneaking into the Theater of Dionysus below the Acropolis at night to drink retsina.
2. My remarkable young friend Driss in Sidi Kacem.
3. Fado in Lisbon.
4. The pre-historic cave paintings in Les Eyzies, at the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume.
5. Discovery of astragali in Neolithic, Greek, Roman and Near Eastern usages; the huge bronze sculpted simulacrum in the Louvre.
6. Venice.
7. Drinking vodka with the Polish workers on the late train from Venice to Athens.
8. French boys getting me stoned on the night train between Narbonne and Toulouse.
9. Belgrade
10.Plakias - Anna
11.Granada - the Alhambra.
12.Bicycling through the Dordogne region in
Southern France.
13. Delphi

6/22/89
To the ruins of ancient Mycenae. On a small plateau between two huge hills the mighty house of Atreus commands a stupendous view of the surrounding countryside even unto the shores of the Aegean far in the distance. Huge foundation stones are all that basically remain. There are scattered remains of a surprisingly small throne room on top with a nearly obliterated temple of Athene. You are ushered into the remains through the exquisite Lions Gate, supported by massive stone pillars and lintel. The two lions, now headless, rear up on hind legs and rest their forepaws on a bas relies support. It would seem that the lost lion's heads looked down fiercely on the approaching citizen. Inside and to the right is grave circle "A" royal burial place. Outside the gate and to the left are the tombs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, in the so-called beehive tholos immense conical structures. The tomb of Aegisthus has collapsed, made entirely of huge stone blocks. Down the road a bit found the Treasury of Atreus (another perfectly intact bee hive tholos) and the so-called Tomb of Agamemnon within, site of Henry Miller's famous vastation - his stunning description in The Colossus of Maroussi came to mind as I stumbled across the threshold waving a flashlight in the pitch blackness. There were no worlds waiting to be smashed to smithereens as I stepped into the giant world of Story, a world of kings and heroes, illicit loves, murder, matricide, incest, revenge, the furies of conscience, the lifting of a divine curse, none of this but the idiotic babble of tourist puppies and the pompous lectures of their puppy guides - this way, ladies and gentlemen - blah blah - and then out again to stumble aimlessly about or pose for pictures.

6/30/89
Home tomorrow. In Athens last three days. Revisited the Agora, a fitting pilgrimage before departing Greece. Stumbled about in blazing mid-day amongst the ruined foundations of temples and public buildings and nice heaps of stone the archeologists have made. Not so much to tread the same ground as say, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle but to pass through and beyond the same spatial coordinates as they did on what would have been for them a typically hot, sunny day in the marketplace. Could everything have happened just here on this relatively small piece of ground? Trials, speeches, plots, intrigue, dialog, democracy, triumph, decline. Some of the best new ideas of the world from this place? It looks more like a bombed out stone quarry than the birthplace of western intellectual ferment. The Athens - Piraeus subway cuts through the very spot where Socrates was tried. A small cluster of ruins lies beside the track and are closed to the public. From the Agora you can see two jurist styled seats carved out of stone where, one imagines, two of Socrates' accusers sat. There is the splendid Temple of Hephaistos of course, overlooking the dusty ruins. Ignoring boundaries again, I skipped over the rope barriers, climbed the old marble steps, and past over the threshold - fateful moment! - into the temple interior. Cool and dark, a soft wind buffeted my face, bird cries echoed of the old stone walls, sanctuary from the intense heat outside. A moment of peace before the guard's shrill whistle summoned me - fateful moment! - back out onto the Hades-like heat. Much like at Delphi at the Temple of Apollo where only pillars remain, beyond the threshold where, just here, the Pythian Oracle sat and pronounced for a thousand years. Delphi, another place more hallucinated then real - reconstruction allows us to marvel at a place of great power and beauty.

So. Knossos, Phaistos, Aghia Triada, Epidaurus. Argos, Mycenae, Tiryns, Corinth, Delphi, Athens - how proud they must have been! Places where I knew for a certainty that I was treading on sacred ground. How assured the vision and steadfast the hands that raised these places!

It would strain a comparison with Odysseus, but I, like him, like any sojourner out of his accustomed place and time, turn my face homeward, bearing the treasures and tokens of sojourning to those left behind so long ago.

Later Journal Entries

9/10/90
This is my first journal entry of a return trip to Europe, to commence sometime in the fall of 1991 (or sooner). What I am visualizing is a no-frills vagabonding tour of Portugal, North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), southern Spain, Italy, Sicily, a more prolonged exploration of the Greek islands and Crete, and finally Western Turkey. My first stop will be Lisbon for sentimental reasons, a city that will always be dear to my heart. And then the open road. No Eurail this time but more hitching and buses, trains only occasionally. Also more hostelling and camping out. Preparations will include getting more physically fit (running and working out), liquidating some personal possessions, and study of places to be visited.

My first trip to Europe has provided me with the knowledge and confidence of traveling to foreign places. I’m now completely at ease with the thought of casual travel from country to country.

9/14/90
On track via travel plans, start new job tomorrow.
Temporary/permanent, twenty minutes away, $5.75/hr. but freedom , can wear jeans, T-shirt, old boots. Money to live and 1.) pay off credit card balance 2.) modest investment in camera and photo stuff 3.) travel bucks for Europe, yes and/or South-Central America. Also hear the call of Canadian expanses - Northwest Pacific, closer to M.R. yes? Start getting rid of stuff - yard sales, give away, whatever. Meanwhile, I have found secluded mandala on Wye Island, a shrine, observatory, and refuge. Camped there last Saturday night. Way back behind old field, high off the Wye River, stars and planets peeking out, high wind in trees and wonderful chorus of night sounds. Read, meditate, write, study. Learning French via cassette home study and workbook. Anthropology, Buddhism - Shamanism, photography, natural history, deep ecology. Running, dieting, laying off too much booze. Aim: clear and calm.

Spain/Morocco-February 1996

2/5/96 Madrid
It should be noted that the area in Morocco I plan to visit has been officially deemed "risky" by a State Department travel advisory. That is, the Rif Mountains and environs. Also, it is the month of Ramadan in the Islamic world. Privation, poverty, and an inclination to be not so friendly towards affluent Christian westerners does not recommend itself to travel there.

2/6/96 Algeciras
Here after a hellishly long train ride from Madrid. Am met at the station by Javier, who manages the Hotel Rif. Nice fellow and I need a place quick. He shows me a room - your basic no frills hostel type accommodation. Algeciras is much as I remember it; crumbling, raunchy, with a smell of sewage and trash everywhere. Went out and had a beer, served by beautiful, decadent, red-hair-cropped-short bar maid with "beat to the bottom of your heart" embroidered on her blouse. Her looks (a few) in my direction are cool and appraising. I aim to kick about town tomorrow and snap some nice touristy pics of this place before taking the ferry to Tangier.

2/6/96
2130 or so in Tangier after very rough crossing, lots of officious bullshit on board and at the port what with passport checks, being made to wait in ferry hold while big trucks unloaded and then, running the gauntlet of dockside hustlers ah me what an uproar. With me are two Canadian fellows I met and befriended, first time travelers to Morocco, a little green and totally unprepared for what is to come and I kinda feel responsible for them. Oh yes and it's Ramadan and the streets of the medina are packed with sights and sounds the intensity of which I had forgotten. Our new made Moroccan interlopers are pressing us at every step. I fend them off somewhat by telling them I've been here before. Nothing to do but stay cool and ride it out. The crush of people, the noise, the utter third world destitution of the crumbling filth ridden streets are a lot to comprehend all at once. And our would be guides are unshakable. We make our way slowly up into the medina to the Grand Socco and in slight desperation duck into a small café, where we are cheerfully followed. Lots of shouting and carrying on. I order three mint teas and slowly the hubbub subsides. An old man serves us harira - spicy bean soup traditionally eaten to break the Ramadan fast, and when the dust settles, we are left with the fellow who is to be our self-appointed guide, "Mustapha".

Portugal - November 1997

11/5/97
In Lisbon after smooth flight from Newark - only just look as all of New York city drops off behind your right shoulder. It's raining heavily now outside my cozy room in the Arco Banderiea, nice and cheap, (1200 Escudos), all the Praca places were much more. It's all strange again, but these are the hard raps needed to demolish the cocoon a bit: an amazing, polyglot city, young African women of stunning beauty are everywhere, also women of mixed African - Portuguese ancestry; tall, slim, gorgeously built and complexioned. There's a hard edge to the city that wasn't here before. People are cool and in a hurry. Young men stand on street corners jabbering into cell phones, homeless men lie in cardboard boxes in the center of the Praca, crazed old men walk up and babble at me incoherently. Things to be expected in any large city but in Lisbon it seems out of place. Or it could be that I have become more hard-edged and cynical and these things get tuned in more easily. All human appetites are catered to, some openly, others in back streets away from public view. The ubiquitous Moroccan guy trying to sell you something "cheap", could it be the same one that was here three years ago? A vision of hell: wandering the crowded, indifferent streets of a foreign city for eternity, trying to sell worthless junk that nobody wants, abjection as a way of existence, perpetually. Foreigner as scapegoat: we've changed from the gentle people we were and it's your fault. Expo'98 to be here next June. New construction everywhere, men labor in muck to what end? Corrupting influx of a profane and greedy culture, from outside. But there are still the good old things here that I love about Lisbon. Techno-beat has supplanted Fado. I didn't hear it once in the record stores down in the Rossio or Praca, but I did see fabulous CD collections - hundreds - in one store. Been here just less than 24 hours, readjusting diurnal rhythms. Need sleep. I'm fifty. Forty the first time. Themes of disintegration.

11/9/97
Vejer de la Frontera. Been here since Friday night. Fascinating, delightful place. Heavy rains nearly made Lisbon a washout. Crossed the Tejo River into Barriero only to learn that a railway bridge further south had been washed out, NO trains to Villa Real! back across the Tejo into Lisbon where the sun breaks through just for me. Stow my backpack and head for the Mouraria/Alfama where I manage to get off a roll of infrared black and white, have no idea if this little experiment is working. The window of sunshine doesn't last long, soon it's raining again. I head back to Barriero. The authorities have devised a plan for busing passengers around the washed out bridge. We arrive in Tunes to continue our train south to Faro. I arrive at a dark and shuttered Villa Real at one thirty in the morning. Wander around the monstrous grid of streets in slight desperation. Some kids out late direct me to a hotel at the far end of town where I get a room for 5000 Escudos. I had the foresight to provision myself with food back in Lisbon so I have shower and meal watching whacky Portuguese late night television. Next day, a tugboat ferry ride across the Guadiana River to Ayamonte. New construction everywhere obscures my memory of the place from eight years ago. More rain. Change my Escudos for Pesetas and then off to Huelva looking for my elusive connection to Vejer de la Frontera. On to Sevilla. Success! Run into my first hustle at the old bus station in downtown Sevilla. Kid walks up and says he needs just 100 more pesetas for bus to Algeciras. The pesky little bastard is practically shouting as I buy my ticket for Vejer. This time the language barrier works in my favor as I gibber at him and he tries to gibber back. I finally brush him off and he melts back into the street hustler twilight of the old Sevilla bus station. Two and a half hours later I step off the bus onto main street Vejer with feelings of relief that my trip is back on schedule. Here's a first - use my Visa card to extract 5000 pesetas from local ATM. No place to change traveler's checks at this hour so what a relief to see five new 1000 peseta notes roll out of the machine into my eager hands! I re-provision myself at the little corner mercado and get a room at nearby Posada Hotel. I do a little late night exploring around the narrow maze-like streets and alleys.

Peru - May 2003

5/21/03
Layover in Newark awaiting flight to Lima, a longish four hours. Heightened terrorist alert, "orange". Splendid milling about of early 21st century American denizens, all ethnicities and lots of poopy white folks, cell phone bedecked like me. Dozens of disembodied conversations, like stairways to nowhere.

Rain. Fog. Somehow, one must generate new information.

Deep space over Cusco, the nightly procession of stars never seen before, old Northern lights obscured by passage across the equator. Awoke this morning from exquisite burnished titanium dream painstakingly riveted. Each rivet and sheet was a conversation with mildly sinister forces. The artifact dissolved in wakefulness. Wine and the alchemist's elixir mingle with a fusion of sunlight through the airliner window. Over water now. Gulf of Mexico?

6:45 PM
Flying over the Gulf of Panama I saw a brilliant dagger of light in the darkening sky that ended in boiling clouds of orange and pink. Marks for me the passing into primeval earthly realms.

Lima 11:00 PM
The Lima airport is a major local hangout when the big international flights come in. They congregate in the hundreds. From ground floor to mezzanine they lean forward behind barriers and ogle you like a movie star. I manage to change some money and ease into a little Internet eatery. I sip a local brew and dash off email dispatches to Michelle and Mike.

Their faces! Burnished bronze, a hint of the Inca lurking beneath, while one cannot forget that Pizarro the Destroyer is also their progenitor. I lugged along entirely too much stuff, even my cell phone, which is useless here. A worker in the Galleria touches me with her kindness and beauty. Something pitch perfect in the way her face registers curiosity and a willingness to be drawn into deeper intimacies. Americans and Europeans are uniformly squint eyed and disreputable looking. The retro appearance of this place, like an old American '50s bus station waiting room.

5/22/03
And now to enjoy the delights of Cusco. Spectacular views of the snow capped Andes on the flight from Lima. Then a wild ride from the airport through funky down-at-the-heels Cusco in early morning chill. The cold and altitude left me catching my breath before retiring at (expensive) hotel room for much needed rest. Now at mid day surveying brilliant sun flooded Plaza de Armas from restaurant balcony with beer and cig. Altitude no problem so far. Policia Natcional and army guys on every street corner. I begin to feel the effects of sensory overload though. Beautiful textiles and crafts strike an agreeably covetous cord. Tourista carrying capacity here quite large and manageable so far. And oh yes, the beautiful live pan pipe music that greeted us at the airport this morning. Time to wander aimlessly again.






Chewing Coca Leaf
Photo by Jacques Henry

Coca tea (mate de coca) to lift the spirits and order the thoughts and ruminations. This is good tea! Illegal in America of course. A good red wine will top the bill later. Fatigue blends agreeably with tea and intoxicating sunlight.

As I said before, one must generate new information out of what is merely given, to be hammered out and fashioned into shiny new ingots. What is given is a fullness, a generosity of place. Analogies from weaving and metallurgy come naturally to mind: weft and weave, striking new alloys from the merging of exotic metals. You are the weaver's loom, the alchemist's furnace.

The near harsh sun at noontime gives way to more subdued mountain light ala Chaouen. The buff colored stones and tiles of the Cathedral bleed into earth tones suggested by some of the vegetable died textiles. Everything here is a corollary of everything else. Boundaries merge together and are lost. With enough time and coca leaf tea, you could recreate the great Amer-Indian cultures on this very spot. And now words must lend themselves to new currencies that create new grammars. Puissant magic.

5/23/03
Brilliant, brilliant beautiful sunlight. Brilliant Inca sunshine! The Inca lived and breathed it like mana, then set out to create their extraordinary civilization. Their descendents sell hamburgers in the Cusco gallerias. The contrast between the Cathedral spires and big fluffy white ones almost hurts the eyes.

The great civilizations always found their beasts of burden close at hand; the Spaniards the horse, the Bedouins the camel, the Inca the llama.

To the Central Market today. Absolutely splendid. A stupendous archetype of human barter and exchange. It would take months to catalog its contents. It is huge, the biggest of such markets I have ever seen, an acre or more, covered in sheets of corrugated plastic that act as sky lights and spilling out into the street. Everything from piglet carcasses to needle and thread to exquisite woven textiles. Standing, sitting and milling about in their hundreds are the Andean salt of the earth.

5/25/03
Sacsayhuaman. Ahem. Later.

Preparations, both hurried and unhurried, have brought me to the departure point to Machu Picchu via Augas Calientes. Here at 5 AM in Cusco San Pedro station, leaving at 6:30. Two slight (so far) infirmities, lower GI distress and a mild cold. Am sipping a delicious Taza de Leche. One little pitcher of highly concentrated café which you dilute to your pleasure with a big jug of warm milk. Add sugar. The bread sellers are out first, in the market across from the station, stacks of big round loaves, as daylight breaks over the mountains in the distance. All aboard, a bright and beautiful day ahead!

Peru April - May 2004

4/21/04
Back to Peru!

Airborne over lower Chesapeake Bay at the beginning of this seven hour flight to Lima, then morning flight to Cusco as before. Drinking white wine and admiring the view: complex mud flat islands interlaced with dozens of little streams and inlets. In flight movie: lame, idiotic, useless. America’s fodder. The pleasure of defecating at 31,000 feet.

4/23/04
In Cusco, standing in the pure streaming light, beautiful and intense at 11,000 feet. No soroche thank god. And the weather forecasts were all wrong! Now for a day of aimless wandering about in this old magical city.

5/3/04
The air feels thinner today. Piñatas of light cartwheel through my head when I close my eyes. I want to be close to a center of learning: maps, stars, geography, explorer's accounts, art, music, culture. Break the old vessels and fashion new ones, clear the mind of all former presumptions, peel away the layers of illusion. A catalog of all things seen, heard, felt and tasted, resolved into a single essence. Send forth the brilliance of your awakening! The Old Ones' nudge was always towards brilliant sanity.

5/4/04
Motorcycle trip through the Sacred Valley, now in Cararo on market day. Gorgeous, unique items, amazing native people! Some village names: Rayanniyoc, Huancalle, Taray, Qoya, Lamay, Calca, Urcos, Huran, Huayocari, Yuccay.

5/15/04
Hospedaje
Sumaq T'ikaq
Tanda Pata 114


Back in Cusco. The above delightful little hostel nestled deep within San Blas. Long looks that linger. Bright sunshine with cloud mottled sky.

[Ricaudi-Quechua for "tomorrow."]

With me are Delphina and Yanette, two lovely sweet young women who follow me around, teaching me Spanish and Quechua which they both speak fluently, naturally, and try to get me to buy their stuff-hand made dolls from Delphina, and beautiful woven belts from Yanette and so, buy I do.

5/18/04
One travels to seek corroboration, to take the serendipitous random walk through a city, across a landscape, along the features of the face of a stranger. When all these things are in agreement, one can be said to have acquired corroboration. But this process does not come to an end, rather, your search for corroboration is re-aligned into more precise forms of inquiry. That is why it has been fruitful to come here for the past three years. Trials and tribulations await - I can sense them with a blind man's fumbling touch - but the price of corroboration is taking risks. You must do so while cultivating forbearance and compassion, and always, gratitude. Then you may sit serenely with your coca leaf, your cigarette, your glass of wine and experience the quiet euphoria of assimilation. Must learn Spanish and at least some Quechua!

Now eating breakfast on balcony overlooking Calle Plateros, a bright, beautiful day.

Today, get train ticket for Aguas Caliente/Machu Picchu. Tomorrow, second tour the Sacred Valley on motorcycle. Delphina, pretty young native woman follows me around. What does she want? More than I should buy her street wares (dolls, CD-Rs that don't work.) Maybe that I should marry her and take her back to America?

[The Incas by Garcillaso De La Vega] [Inca myths]

5/20/04

San Pedro station awaiting train to Aguas Caliente. Sky just lighting up behind Cusco, bright and cloudless. My third privileged trip to Machu Picchu in as many years. Serene physical well being. Thank you Apus! Conclusion of third tour of Sacred Valley yesterday, drinking corn beer (chicha) with campesino family outside of Maras in the shadow of immense glacier capped mountains. Grande montanas!

The night sky
The cultivated earth
Sun arcing in over mountains
Rio Sinuento.
Urabamba?

Campesino mud brick village at the confluence, old Inca stonework, terraces, Ollantaytambo. Bananas, mangos, tortillas, corn, fat kernelled and long eared. Choco-corn con queso.

Mountain steeped in abundance
Eye travels from meadow
wild flower to immense
glaciered massif to
glacier fed streams...

Writing now from Machu Picchu in full view of its splendid ruins. I'm high up, tucked away in a cornice. It does induce tranquility and wonder, even amongst the tramp of innumerable tourist feet. It is overcast, mist and cloud obscuring the distant high valleys.

The sheer stone fastness of this place - a million interlocking stones create a stunning wholeness that can be broken down and subdivided into any number of pleasing fractal integers. The beautiful repeating pattern of descending terraces and staircases. How it must have pleased the Inca master builders to watch it all take shape. A hundred places provide unique settings for observation and contemplation. Move five feet in any direction and your view point changes completely. All ringed about by massifs that dwarf the human scale. A new definition of immensity.

Now back in Aguas Caliente, "Gringo Bill's" again, room 31, $20 a night, cozy and happy. Reading Hiram Bingham's Lost City of the Incas, his excellent account of discovery. Back up to the ruins early tomorrow. Price of admission has gone up-$26-and they only take soles. Big noisy disrespectful crowds of tourist idiots spoil the experience a bit.

5/22/04
Earth Day!...for what it's worth.

In search of Adrian Flores - master of the Andean harp. Heard him perform in Aguas Caliente after waving him and his roving band of musicians into the restaurant where I was dining. Suburb! Gave them a nice tip and asked if they had a CD. One of the boys came back shortly with a CD that was not an original but crummy CD-R copy. Can only listen to first five tracts (out of twelve) the rest skip or don't play at all on my portable CD player. There is something haunting and bittersweet in his music that I like very much. So am looking around for some original CDs by him.

Chewed coca leaf at Machu Picchu yesterday. It seemed fitting. Coca is such a sweet elixir. Felt calm and uplifted for the rest of an arduous exploration of the ruins, up and down many flights of old stone stairways. Earlier that morning sat in awe as sunrise broke over MP, first illuminating the old stones with a bronzed incandescence, then lighting up the whole place like a glowing ember. Someone played zaponas pipe music higher up on the ramparts like an incantation. Got out just as the mongrel tourist hordes were arriving.

Adios, Machu Picchu. Thank you Apus.


5/23/04
Third sojourn up the Sacred Valley on brand new Honda 250cc dirt bike which nearly ended in disaster. The day, pristine picture perfect.

hypnagogic

Pachatata-Father Earth

A Work in Progress

There are countless translations of this indispensable text, mostly a lot of flowery horseshit that its translators confuse with profundity, or worse yet, "poetry." Versions that rhyme (shudder) are simply not worthy of consideration, ever.

Here is an excellent commentary by Kelley L. Ross:

Comments on the Tao Te Ching

This is a version that I began nearly twenty years ago, cobbled together from a half a dozen translations whose creators are long forgotten. I offer this therefore as "Translator Anonymous." It is a lean, spare version that I believe comports more with the original. Here is verse 11, my benchmark for all around literary and philosophical excellence in this work. The whole of TA's version will appear shortly as a linked hypertext.

Thirty spokes converge on a hub.
The use of the wheel depends on the emptiness therein.
Knead clay to make a bowl.
The use of the bowl depends on the emptiness therein.
Cut out doors and windows to make a house.
The use of the house depends on the emptiness therein.
Thus is something gained
by virtue of nothing.

Compare this with the esteemed Stephen Mitchell's version:

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

What a load of shit! This is, quite simply, a very poor translation and I don't even know Chinese. It violates somehow, my innate sense of brevity being the soul of wit, if not the Tao. In other respects however, Mitchell's version is very good, in fact one of my favorites. Here it is in the original Chinese:

Notice that it took Lao Tzu only six lines in the original to accomplish the task at setting forth a profound truth, where our modern day translators take eleven or twelve. Granted, ancient Chinese is a more compact form of expression than modern English. Nevertheless, almost all the translations I've read are bloated and ludicrous. As the Master himself once said:

"Truly, the greatest carver does the least cutting."

Click On Picture For Larger Image

Machu Picchu

Maras
















Cusco Carnival















Cusco At Night


















At Machu Picchu

















Spinning Llama Wool























Quechua Man In Pisac






















Three Little Girls

1976-2006
Kalachakra
Wheel of Time
Impermanence
Ham Ksha Ma La Va Ra Ya

Here are links to a collection of the most audacious lunacy to be found on the Internet. This is the big tent of crazed dreamers and monomaniacal dunderheads, along with their hate-filled brethren.

Combine:
Sarlo's Guru Rating Service

With
Rick Ross Study Of Destructive Cults

And
Cranks On The Net

...and you will have an excellent cross-section of modern delusional thinking in all its permutations and weirdness. Some of this is hard to slog through. There are reams of mind boggling gibberish that will amaze you. Sarlo's has preserved the Marshall Applewhite Heaven's Gate lunacy website. There are not just a few individuals out there pawning themselves off as masters, shris, rinpoches, babas, tulkus, avatars, swamis, gurus, and yogis. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, all out there trolling the waters of the Internet for the lost and gullible. Rick Ross catalogs hundreds of lunatic cults from Adi Da to Zhong Gong. An encyclopedia of human folly.

Speaking of which:

Some Observations On Mel Gibson's "The Passion Of The Christ."

I categorically detest Christianity, surely one of the strangest delusional systems ever hatched by the human mind. Actually, I'm against all organized religion with the exception of Buddhism. But I really can't call myself a Buddhist as long as I feel this intense visceral disgust for Jesus Christ and all his loathsome works upon this planet. "Cast Jesus Christ Out Of Your Life Today" is the motto I hurl back to the born again crowd of fundamentalist vermin overrunning this country with their notions of "decency" and "compassionate conservatism." Yes I know, Christians have given us great works of literature, music, and architecture. But they have also been busy exterminating their perceived enemies throughout the ages and wrecking the environment. So when Mel Gibson's smelly little movie came out last year, I couldn't resist heaping the utmost filth and abuse upon it and him. From a chat room sponsored by the Internet Movie Database come these choice comments and responses to the faithful.

Christians, pass by.

On Feb. 25th, the diverse peoples of the world, who would just as soon be left alone to practice their religion in the humble privacy of their homes or places of worship, will be collectively dick slapped by St. Mel Gibson and his disgusting propaganda film "Der Passion" etc. etc. This film will go down in cinematic history as one of the most in-your-face guilt trip excursions ever made of the crucifixion theme. Here is a sample of the guilt-trip, anti-Jewish crud language favored by Mel Gibson's brand of fascist Catholicism:

"Gone is the mission to convert the perfidious Jews and unbelievers for it wouldn't be politically correct. Never mind what Christ and His Apostles say, we must not upset man and the New Order!"

Believe me, I usually sit out most arguments regarding religion. Then, Mel had to go and make his awful movie and the Christers came swarming out like a Biblical sized hoard of cockroaches. This I could not ignore. I see it as a call to action. And by the way, I believe in the ad hominem attack. Attack the person, not his argument! Attack him, discredit him, and he and his argument collapse like a rotten house of cards. Yes, I know it's against all the rules of civility. But all is fair in war and believe me, this IS war. And it does get their attention, if not their respect. Personally, I think Christianity will be extinct in a hundred years or less. It will collapse of its own impurity. I see it as my life's mission to hurry the process along as effectively as one human lifetime will permit.
******************************
I think Christ had Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

"It's drastic. The symptoms are sometimes constant. There's diarrhea and abdominal pain or constipation and bloating. I can't commit to anything too far in advance or anything that is regularly occurring..."

A very Christian disease. No wonder they are so mean.

"Mel Gibson Is Unclean"
******************************
No other religion lays on the guilt trip quite like Christianity. How? Christianity teaches that:

1. We are all born sinners.
2. Some guy named Jesus died for our sins.
3. We must accept this Jesus as our personal savior.
4. The penalty for not accepting this Jesus is eternal damnation.
5. We are all responsible for the crucifixion of this Jesus.

For two thousand years, this wicked and debased teaching has been chipping away at human happiness and dignity. For two thousand years, Christianity has had the chance to create a compassionate, enlightened society and has failed miserably. Christians have murdered millions, destroyed unique cultures that resisted its criminal missionaries, and are now busy, along with their Islamic brethren, destroying the earth’s fragile ecosystems. Cast Jesus Christ out of your life forever!!!! All he has a key to is the shit house. Stand up as a free and proud people and create a truly enlightened society without dogma, shame, and weakness. Dare to believe in the basic goodness of human beings, not their basic “sinfulness.“
******************************
Seriously though, I think we are in for a mountain of Christian zealotry and all around religious horseshit when this filthy spectacle of a movie is released. What is it about Christians that compels them to make movies like this? You don't see Muslims making movies of Mohammad, or Jews of Abraham do you? I myself have no intention of being dirtied by this movie and enriching idiots like Mel Gibson. We don't need yet another depiction of a bloodied, beaten-up-and-crucified Jesus Christ. This creature did not die for my sins. I want to emphasize just how utterly I reject the message of this movie. Go see it only if you want to be slapped in the face with uplifting emotions like guilt, shame, and weak blooded submission and humiliation - what Christianity has been dumping on the world for the last two thousand years.
******************************
Why is it that only Christians feel compelled to make movies of their savior and founder? You don't see Muslims making movies of Mohammed, or the Jews of Abraham and Moses. Only Christians make movies like this, and now The Passion exceeds all others in its realistic depiction of the crucifixion. The stills I've seen look god-awful, a blood bespattered Christ like no other. And in one scene, Mel Gibson's hand is seen driving in the first nail! This does not arouse reverence in me but rather disgust. It's as though Christians, frightened and insecure at the thought that their religion may not be the one "true" religion, have to devise ever new ways to club us into submission with guilt and shame over the sufferings of Jesus, who "died for our sins" blah blah blah.... I do not plan to see this movie. I think Mel Gibson is an idiot and I don't care to be slimed by the premise of shared guilt and craven submission that is this movie's premise and I reject utterly.
******************************
"Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it, she's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it."

-Mel Gibson

More like a pronouncement from Mel's outhouse. Mel is becoming a spokesman in good standing for fascist Catholicism. Blaming the Jews for the crucifixion by the way, is an article of their faith. Their writings are filled with terminology like "faithless Jews", "perfidious Jews", "conversion of the Jews", etc. Check out their official online screed The Daily Catholic but not if you get sick easy. Fellow Catholic fascist and editor Michael Cain joins forces with the depraved lunacy of Christopher Ferrara for some of the most hate filled writing to be found on the Internet, reminiscent of neo-Nazi and white supremacist rhetoric. And St. Mel would damn his own virtuous wife? Then no one is safe from his depredations.
******************************
I'm not interested in some lame, mutual masturbation game with the Christers. It's time to sack their churches, burn their bibles, and hurl their god and savior into the sewage from which he came. The Passion of the Christ, in case you haven't noticed, is a declaration by fascist Catholicism to shove their twisted, anti-Semitic version of the Gospels down everybody's throat. My replies to Mel Gibson and his admirers will be the meanest, filthiest things I can think of.
******************************
By unclean, I mean that Mel Gibson is like a tough old disease causing microbe that mutates into something more vile and resilient every time we, the more wholesome lot of humanity, find a new vaccine to rid him and his kind from our midst. The best vaccine is and always will be the truth, but propagandists rarely tell the truth and fanatics like Mel never do. That is why I say, in this and other posts, that the problem here is not Jesus Christ and his insufferable, interminable, "Passion," not Christianity per se, but the dark and twisted mind of Mel Gibson.
******************************
May I finally put this line of praise, much seen on this board, permanently to rest? This movie really isn't brave of Mel at all. It is the lavish indulgence of a spoiled pretty boy who spent more than twenty years fattening himself on the Hollywood golden calf. His wealth, fame, and material comfort are assured. If this had been Mel's first or second movie, I would give him a little more credit for being "brave".
******************************
My dear a_forbes,
I've tried being nice. All it got me was a lot of crummy, syrupy invitations from born again Christians to "read my Bible" and "get saved" etc, etc. It is now time to make clear to these morons that I regard such solicitations as the equivalent of being invited by Adolph Hitler to participate in one of his beer hall putsches, or march in one of Joseph Goebbels propaganda rallies. The problem as I see it is this. Christianity cannot be rehabilitated. It cannot be reformed. It cannot be made amenable to the simple everyday needs inherent in the human condition. All it can do is chip away at human dignity until we are all a bunch of mindless drooling idiots, filled with shame and guilt, abjectly begging forgiveness for a crime we did not commit. Mel Gibson is a fanatic and fanatics are not nice people. I, in turn, do not intend to be nice to him, his religion, or his movie.

"Hell is the truth seen too late."
******************************
My Dear Brunken7,
If all humanity were to have capitulated to your hideous brand of pessimism, we would not have risen much above the beasts. We have made some progress as a species. Just look at the glorious pictures now being sent back from Mars by the two rovers, sent there by humans possessed of extraordinary curiosity, integrity and goodness. My, what gutters of defeatism you Christians wallow in. Try sitting on the curb for a while, you might enjoy the view. Oh and by the way, the Rapture is a cruel Christian hoax. It's not going to happen my boy. Never, ever, ever.
*****************************
May I cordially suggest that no human being, raised in the certainty of his or her innate goodness and decency, has the slightest need of a god, savior, prophet or messiah, much less the fucking Bible, which, as Thoreau once said, is a good book like any other. As a non-Christian, I have generously availed myself of the vast wisdom to found in other good books like the Upanishads, Bhagavad-Gita, Zend Avesta, and the Buddhist Sutras. These works have a slightly more optimistic and refreshing view of human nature and destiny than the miserable one Christianity has bequeathed to us.
******************************
My Dear Ballys990,
We infidels are here to pull down the revival tent of fascist Christianity and expose Herr Gibson as the cruel religious fanatic that he is. His interviews with Raymond Arroyo of EWTN and Dianne Sawyer are most revealing. I have never seen such devious body language in my life. The braying exclamations! The wild gestures! The beady, darting eyes! See, I think Mel long ago crossed over that fateful threshold that, quite frankly, divides the clean from the unclean. What terrible secret is this man hiding? Mel, indeed, is going to Hell, if he isn't there already.
******************************
But my dear kyork 8,
You have merely enumerated the prominent evil acts of our times, which are numerous indeed. But might I cordially suggest that the acts of basic human goodness, carried out everywhere on Earth everyday far outnumber the acts of human wickedness? If this were not so, we would have ceased to exist as a species long ago. Just consider the enormous damage done to a child who is told that he is a “sinner” from birth. If his only incentive to do good is the fear of damnation, he or she will not prove to be good citizens of their culture, much less of humanity’s.
******************************
Thank you for your learned reply. Are you a professor of religion or something? I’m impressed! Just the same though, I think I’ll stick to my original Yeshua story. It helps me to humanize a rather cold and indeed sinister impression that you Fundies have given of Jesus, especially the part about him coming back and condemning people like me to (gulp!) Hell!!! You Christians are such spoilsports. Can’t I let my imagination roam a bit and try and turn Jesus into just a bit of a warmer, friendlier guy? By the way, see “The Last Temptation of Christ” Scorcese’s wonderful movie (and the only Jesus movie I like) for a lovely cinematic meditation on the sweet possibilities of a happily married (with children!) Jesus. After all, much in the gospels is fiction. They invite embroidery.
******************************
I think the best way of responding to the many objections to my earlier post (Why Another Bloody Jesus Movie?) is to make the following statements:

1. I'm not against making movies of a religious nature, or any movie at all for that matter. Go ahead and make all the Jesus movies you want. Just be aware that by viewing such movies, you are being spoon fed someone else's interpretation of the gospels, which happen to deal with matters as close to your heart and soul as one could imagine. The danger of being coolly manipulated by someone even as holy as Saint Mel Gibson is very real.

2. Having said that, just look at the crass way this movie is being marketed. Looking over several of the many "Passion" web sites. I could not tell whether they were promoting a movie about the Son of God or just another episode of Star Wars or Captain Nemo. I find that a disgraceful trivializing of what is supposed to be the "greatest story ever told."

3. And finally, if you are a Christian, learn New Testament Greek so you can read the gospels in their true original language. Don't tell me it's too hard to learn Greek. What greater act of devotion could you make for your savior then to take on this arduous, but ultimately highly rewarding task? It would absolutely beat the passive experience of merely watching any movie about Christ, regardless of how clever the screenplay or glorious the cinematography.

I haven't seen the movie, (don't intend too) but from the stills I've seen on the movie web site, it looks god-awful. Only frightened and insecure little Christians make movies like this. Do we need to be shown yet again Jesus being bloodied, beaten-and-nailed-to-the-cross?! You don't see Muslims making movies of Mohammad, or the Jews of Abraham and Moses do you? Its only virtue is that it is extremely realistic, in fact, Mel Gibson's hand is shown driving in the first nail! I don't know about you, but I find this sick and disgusting. Go see this movie only if you want to be slapped in the face with uplifting emotions like shame, guilt, and weak blooded submission and humiliation. Isn't two thousand years of this pathetic crap enough already? When it opens on Feb. 25, I will be far, far away from the movie theater!

Reply

Well, some people are reading my Blog. Here's a letter from a nice Christian lady who is trying to show me a kinder side of her religion and my reply...

Wow...you had a lot to say. I can understand your
anger.

I have to agree with you on your comment "Can't
I let my imagination roam a bit and try and turn
Jesus into just a bit of a warmer, friendlier
guy?" Your imagination wouldn't be far from the
truth. Jesus was compassionate and full of love
for others. He hung out with the people society
had rejected and he encouraged them: prostitutes,
tax collectors, lepers etc.

Unfortunately, we humans have bastardized what
Christianity is. We look at as a religion and
not a way of life. Religion is what creates all
the rules and regulations...the things that make
us feel guilt and shame...constantly someone over
your shoulder...ready to point out your smallest
flaw.

Even Jesus spoke out against this in the New
Testament when he spoke to the Pharisees and
Saducees. He used parables to display how they
were creating huge burdens for the people by
their laws, when instead they should be loving on
them and encouraging them.

I'm not going to preach... smile. Just wanted
to let you know I was here and I read your post.
By the way, I didn't go to see the movie either.
I don't even have the desire to do so...the whole
concept of commercializing Jesus just doesn't sit
well with me. I don't need Hollywood to play
show and tell about the crucifixion for me to
understand.

Peace

Michele

Hi Michele,

Thanks for the nice email. I'm really not this
hard on Christians in real life. But I must
confess that to me, Christ is a bit of an
enigma. I believe he is based on an actual man
named Yeshua bar Joseph, who lived 2000 years
ago in Judea and said and did extraordinary
things. He could have been a stone mason or a
carpenter or a shop keeper. Perhaps he married
and had children. He never claimed to be the son
of God. In any case, he accomplished his
ministry and passed on. All the other details of
his life come to us courtesy of the Gospels and
St. Paul which I regard as propaganda. I have
seen depictions of Christ in cathedrals and
monasteries all over the world that are severe
and forbidding. Too many Christians want their
savior to be an avenging angel of death, not the
gentle man from Galilee. See the "Left Behind"
series of books by Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
The Rapture strikes me as a most unchristian
concept. Just this week a jury in Colorado
consulted the Bible in a capital murder case and
then condemned a man to death. They paid
particular attention to "an eye for an eye,"
instead of "thou shalt not kill" or "love thy
neighbor." The Colorado Supreme Court sensibly
threw out the sentence.

So I am sometimes cruel in my posts about Christ,
in proportion to the cruelty I see practiced by
his followers. But now and then, a kind person
like yourself shows me the true spirit of Yeshua bar
Joseph and my hope for Christianity is uplifted a
bit.

More Peace,
Miguel

... the Eschaton, and the Transhuman Dimension

You have entered an Alchemical Garden at the Edge of Time. There is haze upon the distant hills, spreading Acacias bend low over reflecting pools. The air is filled with an all pervasive hum; these are the reveries of the Proustian bees. Your guide will be gardener/curator Terence McKenna....

These web sites contain the precious archives of Terence McKenna's writing and thinking. No one in modern times attempted such profound acts of syncretism as McKenna, which made his lectures (if you could call them that) utterly engrossing. I met him once during "A Weekend With Terence Mckenna" held at Seven Oaks in Virginia in 1996 under highly amusing circumstances, but that's another story. Let's just say that McKenna has become a trusted guide through the murkiness and confusion of the times we live in. Whenever I am depressed, I think of McKenna's lifelong mission to bring just a sliver of comprehension to the masses, who, it seems, know not wither they go nor why, and I feel uplifted. He was a true hollow bone in the Sioux spiritual tradition, a conduit through which the Old Ones speak to us anew. He died in April, 2000.







TerenceMckennaLand
Hyperborea

See also:
The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension


Here is my favorite McKenna quote:


"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had 5- or 6-billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain forests and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance."

"The Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set."

"If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed".

I love the optimism of this statement. If only we could drag people away from their fucking "reality" shows and the 1001 other idiotic distractions of "consensus reality" and reveal to them the magic lantern shows in their own heads, we would make real progress. "Consensus," as a source of guiding constructs for humane and compassionate action leading to enlightened society, is dribbling away before the onslaught of religious fanaticism, paranoid governments, and an oafish disregard for the environment; what Dale Gowin has called the "hypnotic somnambulism of American consumer culture." There will be no such thing as "early adapters" of the brave new world we are creating.

And here, free of his usual impossible jargon comes this real nugget of wisdom:

"Use your lifetime for the sake of Divine Self-Realization. If you use it for anything less, then what is less becomes your destiny....." Adi Da Samraj

Victim Of Capital Punishment

An odds and ends collection of VERY opinionated letters and commentary from a capital punishment chat room...

Many of the paragraphs below are replies to some of the most bloodthirsty and sadistic people I have ever had the displeasure of meeting on the Internet. We were part of a pro-and-con death penalty forum hosted by Yahoo. Most of the participants were overwhelmingly pro capital punishment, so I had my hands full expressing a life long opposition to this charming brand of socially sanctioned murder. Many also professed to be devout Christians, so some of my responses are not Christian friendly. I'll let them stand as examples of the hostility one can be drawn into when participating in such groups. I finally quit in disgust after listening to "Christians" turn their savior into a modern day executioner, smiling beatifically as he presses the plunger on a syringe full of lethal chemicals and sending another poor devil to his just reward. The letters are replies to three bone stupid conservative editorials appearing in The Washington Times and a short lived local rag called The Public Enterprise. Now, five years later, it all seems so pre 9/11.

3/21/00
Editor
The Washington Times
Sir:

It is sad and ironic that Madalyn Murray O'Hare, who did not suffer fools gladly, had the misfortune of giving birth to one. I refer to Seth Hettena's March 15th article "Famous atheist's son tries to revive prayer banned in his name". William J. Murray employs the fatuous rhetoric of a bygone era when he implies that the opponents of school prayer are "collectivists bent on the destruction of America". He further implies that such opposition is, alas, a "sin". I and a lot of other good Marylanders who oppose school prayer cordially invite Mr. Murray to return to the conservative bastions of Virginia from which he came, where he is free to stir up the kind of religious mischief not much welcomed in Maryland. If he is so intent on making a case for religiosity, let him prevail upon Gov. James Gilmore to suspend the death penalty so beloved and much practiced in his home state. Executions and the public profession of Christ's teachings make an odious combination.

mwmayer

9/8/84
Mr. Frank Pierce Young
The Public Enterprise
Sir:

Thomas French Norton is a confused man. His simple minded editorial about the Holocaust reveals him as a person with a blinkered historical prospective, incapable of critical thinking. What a very odd way of completely missing the point! Someone should sit down with Mr. Norton and patiently explain to him why the Holocaust looms so large in contemporary consciousness, why it was so much more than an act of genocide. If no one can be found to illuminate Mr. Norton, then perhaps he will bother reading some of the recent literature about those who engineered the holocaust and those who suffered it. But I doubt whether anything would carry much conviction for a man who apparently believes that genocide is just one of those historical inevitabilities that human beings capriciously inflict on one another. You would think that the continued incidence of genocide in the world, of which Mr. Norton labors to cite example after example, would persuade him that the problem requires not less, but more study. To accuse the Israelis of practicing genocide in Lebanon and then yawningly compare the Holocaust to the internment of Japanese-Americans is just the kind of muddle-headed thinking a holocaust Memorial might correct. Taxpayer's money? For a fraction of the cost of a single B-1 bomber, we could have a facility that just might help bring moral illumination and tolerance for cultural diversity to a world bereft of both.

The old "everybody is guilty" implication of Mr. Norton's editorial is a thoroughly banal rhetorical device. If everybody is guilty of genocide then nobody is guilty! The moral order collapses under such thinking and questions of accountability and justice become problematic in the extreme. What a bleak prospect for humanity if, as Mr. Norton apparently believes, a Klaus Barbe or a Josef Mengele can step forth, murder millions with impunity, and then melt safely back into the faceless hordes of their insouciant brethren. After an interval of a generation or so, the criminal descendents of a Stalin, or a Hitler, or a Pol Pot, lured by the sloth and idle malignity of "the herd" are beckoned forth to murder anew, like the grim fulfillment of Santayana's warning about what happens to a people who forget their past.

Does Mr. Norton believe there is no remedy for the state of affairs he so glibly portrays? Does he really believe that neither individuals nor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into realms of higher moral comprehension? He at least concedes that "the memory of the Holocaust must not be allowed to fade". Well, in order for it not to fade, the extant records must be widely available for study. I believe that the architects of the Holocaust Memorial ask only one question. Can the next, possibly imminent, act of genocide be prevented? Only, they might answer, if a dedicated, informed world citizenry rises up and roars with indignation at those who begin perpetrating such atrocities.

Learn, to the last quotidian detail, what happened to the victims of Nazi aggression between the years 1933-1945 and you will have the best documented case of genocide in our time and an instrument for preventing it in the future. Let the next act of wanton mass murder happen in silence and we are all, indeed, accomplices.

mwmayer

9/5/93
Editor
The Washington Times
Sir:

I see that your loathsome little chatterbox of conservative hate mongering is at it again. I refer to Samuel Francis’s Amy Biehl column of 9/3/93. This latest specimen of degenerate opinionating stands in a category all its own. From the comfort of his air conditioned office, the craven Mr. Francis can content himself with vilifying a young woman who is no longer around to defend herself. There are so many wrongful and hurtful things in this column as to be unworthy of refutation. The imbecilic use of the word “bubblehead” (eleven times) is surely the sign of mental enfeeblement. And the appalling ignorance of the history and true state of affairs in South Africa left me dumbfounded.

But after all, one does not read Sam Francis for illumination. One reads him with the same guilty fascination of a spectator at a freak show. The freakish Mr. Francis has contorted himself into shapes so at variance with simple human decency as to be hardly recognizable. One blanches at the sight, and then moves on quickly to more wholesome fare.

So, here’s to all the shrill and heartless pedagogues of the world. Here’s to you, Samuel Francis. You have confirmed far better than the lamentations of Melanie Jacobs that we do, indeed, need a million more Amy Bhiels. Thank God, there is only one of you.

mwmayer

George W. Bush is the most unworthy, disgusting man ever to run for the presidency. And anyway, how could I ever vote for a man who has a mouth that looks like an asshole?

The people of South Carolina are sheep, and that's the truth of the matter. They are taught (indoctrinated) at an early age to revere without question the Word from On High and it doesn't matter if that word comes from a pulpit or a godamned TV set. They can secede from the Union again as far as I'm concerned and create their own bloody little racist Gulag where they won't pollute the rest of us.

Cue-card boy. The Shamed One. Country Club Republican. The little dummy. Smirking little imbecile. Only slightly smarter than Dan Quayle. Shrub. Dubya. All of these lovely epithets have been applied to the Governor from Texas in this forum alone. Nothing comparable written about John McCain. You see, Bush just does not command respect. Please John, win big for democracy, America, and common sense.

Let's see, the state of Texas executes women, the elderly, the poor, and now, the mentally retarded. And you my friend, are proud of this. If I had my way, I would separate the state of Texas from the rest of the union, so as not to be dirtied by IT and it's debased citizenry. As for George W. Bush, I say Seig Heil Mien Führer! Adolph Hitler was another human monster who took pleasure in the murder of the mentally retarded. What's cooking? Your worthless immortal soul.

Well gosh, thanks for the little nugget of wisdom Miss Hissy Fit. I'm beginning to suspect, Cerulean, that you are a member of the lunatic fringe "kill 'em all, let god sort them out" school of pro CPers. Maybe we can get you a date with one of the hairy chested men in Huntsville who bravely stick needles in people's arms, hoping they will die quickly so they can get back to watching the Jerry Springer show. Or maybe it's a woman. Probably wouldn't make any difference to you. Now there's a million dollar idea: the first live execution carried out on Jerry's show, featuring ring mistress Madam Cerulean, with her bull whip and black leather tights. So, according to you, all murders are first degree murders, punishable by death? If your answer to that question is yes, then I think you have pretty much forfeited your right to be taken seriously on this forum.

Well, thanks doc, for your interesting story. Here's a story for you. Recently, (I think it happened in Florida) two soccer dads got into an argument. They soon came to blows. The larger soccer dad beat the smaller one to death with his bare hands in front of both sons, even as the larger soccer dad's son was trying to pull him away. Now, when this man got up that morning, he was just as typical as you or I. He had a wife and kids, a well paying job and a house in the suburbs. He was not considered a violent man. In one tragic moment he lost control and brutally murdered an innocent man. Later, he was deeply remorseful. My point is, anyone can become a murderer, even the next door neighbor who walks his dog in the morning and goes to PTA meetings. Does this person fit the profile of the kind of murderer you saw that night? Of any "typical" murderer? They're not all the depraved, and foaming-at-the mouth stereotypes you see on TV. What should his punishment be?

Hell on earth doesn't come much closer than the inside of a supermax prison, so please don't bore me with how nice it is be in one, even with its few pathetic amenities. And would it so offend your sense of propriety to think that some condemned person just might find salvation through a genuine desire to reform himself? Many have you know. That is, unless you believe that all murder is capital murder, punishable by death. Is that what you believe? Not even George W. is that cold hearted. And your statement "We do set an inviolable premium on life. If you choose to take the life of another unlawfully, with malice and aforethought you get to pay with your life" is so illogical I barely have the strength to refute it.

What a stupid question. Of course I would save them. It's called self defense, and as I explained earlier that's not the same as dragging a defenseless man from his jail cell and coldly putting him to death. Belief in self defense does not contradict opposition to the death penalty as you pro DP mongers like to think. Another tired old argument. Executions are the most primitive form of first degree murder there is. Nothing could be more premeditated, especially for someone who has spent years on death row. Killing in self defense is almost never premeditated. And most importantly, it is not an institution like CP that murders with cold, machine like precision. As for your answer to my question, I can't seem to break the log jam of your confused simplistic thinking. You said "If people would stop murdering there would be no need for the death penalty." Correct. But who is going to stop first? Not the deranged John Gacys and Ted Bundys of the world. So I guess it will have to be us, the God fearing, law abiding citizens of this land. It's the price we pay for not being like them. As hard as it would be, we, the civilized ones, must set an inviolable premium on all human life, or else we make it that much easier for the next vicious murderer to dehumanize and kill his victim. Think about it: capital punishment actually increases the incidence of murder! Yes, I know. It feels so good to watch a condemned man die. Like I said, blood lust is a hard addiction to break. But be careful. There are places where we treat the addicted no matter how righteous they think their cause is. They are called mental institutions.

No. Read my post carefully! Comparing personal self-defense to capital punishment as societal self defense is a false analogy. Self defense is thrust unwillingly upon an intended victim, whereas you CP lackeys have plenty of time to think what you are about to do. Years in fact. Could anything be more coldly premeditated and malicious as that?

Thanks for your interesting post doc. You certainly know the culture there in W. North Carolina better than I do, although I've gotten a tantalizing glimpse of the Appalachian people through a series called the Foxfire books. There are about a dozen and each one portrays a different facet of rural mountain life (North Carolina included.) The picture that emerges is one of a people whose strength and resourcefulness in the face of daily adversity revels the original pioneering spirit. If you need something, you make it. If you want to be entertained, you tell a story. You do your own birthing, your own doctoring, your own spiritual ministrations. Of course they have their share of drunkenness, thievery and murder. Some people got their impression of this part of the country from the movie "Deliverance," where country people are made to look like the end product of inbreeding and too much corn liquor. So forgive me if I idealize a bit. After all, this country was founded on idealism. And like so many Americans, I want to preserve some small version of the way life was in this country before there where cars, TVs, and a thousand and one other things that make life easier, but maybe not more civilized.

An Eye For An Eye

Doc, you and I will never agree about capital punishment. There is something seductive about it, I know. It seems so right, so just. It feels good. A murderer is himself put to death and the slate is wiped clean. An eye for an eye. (To see how far this thinking can go, consider this. Recently in Saudi Arabia, where they take such injunctions literally, an Egyptian man had his left eye surgically removed as punishment for his crime, which was a terrible one; he had thrown acid in another man's face. BUT????!!!!!!) However, the price we pay for this seduction is a steady erosion of our own most cherished values. You say that some people look at the lack of the death penalty as a kind of license. But I could argue from a different prospective. A would be murderer might ask himself, if the stalwart, upstanding citizens of this Christian country don't give a hoot about the sanctity of human life, why should I? If the state teaches that death is the ultimate punishment, then it has confirmed the murderer's own belief that murder is an appropriate way of evening a score, or indulging in plain old fashioned blood lust. As I have stated before, capital punishment devalues human life, regardless of how unworthy we've judged that human life to be, making it that much easier for the murderer to dehumanize and kill his next victim. What more could we say about our commitment to the value of human life, but to spare it in one so unworthy as a Ted Kaczinsky, or an Eric Rudolph? I'm not so naive as think that banning capital punishment would put an end to murder. But it would establish that we, the civilized ones, have placed an inviolable premium on human life that we will not let the dregs of humanity cheapen and destroy. IF NOT US, WHO?

"You don't try and stop someone's drug habit when you're busy smoking pot, do you?" Thank you, MCD. You have summed up, in one simple sentence, the appalling contradiction faced by supporters of the death penalty. They have never offered a logical resolution to this contradiction.

Talk about illogical. You assert that MCD's ideas are "honorable." Doesn't that imply that yours are dishonorable? And all this poppycock about the "young and naive." If we had more youthful idealism in this country and less middle aged cynicism, we would all be a lot better off. And as for our "tolerance level" for violence in this country, might I suggest that when executions become as routine as buying a loaf of bread at the local 7-11, we are adding immeasurably to that tolerance. This, on top of incredibly violent movies, video games and TV shows. And nothing is more "trite" than the death penalty. It's the feel good, easy way out for a society that has lost its moral bearings. Think about it, DP advocates: executions might just be contributing to the murder rate in this country. Abolish it now!!!!

Doc, in reference to an earlier post of yours, anyone who requires the execution of another human being in order to achieve "closure" isn't much more advanced than the murderer being executed.

Doc, I'm beginning to think that the source of your corn pone wisdom comes from sitting around in your NC outhouse picking lint out of your navel. If Cerulean is the best person you know, then pal you need to make some new friends. What bothers me about the two of you is that there is no light at the end of your tunnel. All I read is doom and gloom and endless horror stories. And your response is always so predictable: Kill, Kill, Kill! Years from now when people look back on this era, they will be as disgusted with our DP obsession as we today are disgusted by slavery. Doc, a train called "Enlightened Civilization" is pulling up in a town near you. Don't let it pass you by.

Ah, come on sore loser. Want to know why you and doc lost this debate? It's because good always triumphs over evil. When confronted with the sheer savagery of your opinions, you and doc were forced to slink back to your lairs like foul things in the night. Whether you like it or not Cerulean, the young and idealistic in this country are going to build you an new, enlightened society. You can either join or stay behind in your broken down tar paper shacks, dreaming of the "good old days" of lynchings and electrocutions

Well looky here! Cerulean is walking off in a huff! Unable to win her debates through genuine logic or persuasion, she has resorted to name calling. Talk about immature. Goodbye old girl! Please take your dildo and vibrating sex toys with you. No wonder your such a lousy debater, with one hand on the keyboard and the other fondling your crotch, getting off on visions of men being fried in the electric chair and nigras swinging from trees! Now if we can just get rid of your drooling idiot friend raventears, we might just have a half way intelligent debate on this forum.

It's heuristic 77 doc. Heuristic69 was an earlier incarnation of mine that I decided to abandon. I have read the posts of MCD, and he doesn't seem to be playing games at all. He has replied, point by point, to your and Cerulean's condescending posts with patience and intelligence. Maybe that's what bothers you: a thoughtful poster with a genuine reverence for life. And I think bush has made a telling point here too.

"Abolish capital punishment first and then we can turn our attention to the problem of murder, immune from the charges of hypocrisy. Having ascended to the moral high ground that you the other pro DP folks have so shamefully abandoned, we won't be distracted with the messy business of executions."

This was in reply to a specific question launched by Cerulean, and I think it is a good one. So there is nothing frivolous going on here. You should be glad that we are taking your posts seriously enough to give them the quality replies that we have. Now if you and Cerulean would do the same without being preachy (please, no more "you're just young and inexperienced, some day you'll see the light") we might just have an intelligent debate.

...oh and one more thing cutey pie. Seems that what you're really pissed at is that you can't resort to the old fashioned justice of your ancestors. No more "nigras" swinging from trees right doc? The very worst violators of common decency in this country always seem to come from the Death Penalty Belt (formerly known as the Bible Belt). Gawd almighty, I can smell the fresh air already!

Ah come on guys you're breaking my heart. If my last few posts have been rude and abrasive, it's because of your own hateful name calling and stereotyping. Remember doc and Cerulean, I did try to connect with you on a more friendly basis. All I got for my troubles was to be labeled a "suck up." I won't make that mistake again. And Cerulean dear, I'm 53 years old, so I out rank you by 11 years. I grew up with the civil rights movement and I remember segregation and the horror of the Jim Crow laws first hand. It was you, Cerulean, who used the term "nigra" in one of your posts, and I thought, oh shit, here we go. Ruffle up a white southern lady's feathers and out comes her pent up racism. That is a hateful term in any context, a substitute for the really bad N word. So please don't lecture me about goodness and propriety. Want to see your worst enemy? Take a look in the mirror.

{{I want to apologize for not deleting that post sooner. I have since deleted them, and they will not be tolerated on this board. Post # 351 was completely unacceptable. I hope that in the future, we do not read any posts that have even an inkling of a sexual innuendo, let alone what Bush wrote today. I apologize doc, cerulean, mad cow, and everyone else who might have read that. Bush is no longer a member of this club, and I hope anyone that was thinking of leaving, will reconsider and please stay. There has been quite a bit of good debate, and I would hate to see one person ruin it for everyone. Once again, I apologize to all of you that read Bush's post. I wish I had been here to delete it and him sooner.}}

Well, I guess they'll have to kick us all out doc, since you and Cerulean have more than distinguished yourselves in violating the terms of service. Doc, I'm sitting here smoking a nice, hand rolled cigarette and sipping a glass of cold Chablis, laughing my ass off at you and Cerulean. You don't like it that I have returned to both of you the spite you're so willing to dish out? Tough shit assholes.

I do not understand this impulse of yours to attack and demean a fellow poster. I have to agree with MCD: you are an angry man, lashing out at people who disagree with you. "There is beauty in this world, but there is none in you." Oh really? And just who are you to make such a sweeping statement? Better look into your own dark heart, doc.

{{I'm afraid you won't keep me. Thank you for trying though to keep it civil. Cerulean has left already and so will I. That kind of attack hurts which is why these jerks make them .. to hurt. Too often in such a heated question, those on one side of the issue accept and reward one who trashes their opponent; no matter if the means he uses are despicable. This is the problem of activism. To paraphrase Philip Wyle, it is incapable of "seeking the answer rather than proclaiming it." It also has to demonize those that disagree. (See heuristic above)}}

Let's not confuse patriotism with having to condone a debauched political process that allows capital punishment to flourish. I love the country whose founding documents include the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. They contain some of the most stirring language ever written for the cause of freedom and human rights. Bear in mind that even advanced democracies like England and Germany do not have a First Amendment. Freedom of expression can and is routinely curbed in these countries. For example, Mein Kampf is banned in Germany. Perhaps that's understandable in a country that was nearly destroyed by the Nazi regime and still suffers from the shame of that era. But in this country, the marketplace of ideas is wide open and we can read and discuss anything, regardless of how repugnant, or critical of the prevailing political powers in office, it may be. As for the American flag, I agree that it's just a symbol. It is the above founding documents that are the holy of holys and it is they, and the freedoms they guarantee, that Americans have fought and died for. Remember, the so called "flag burning" amendment was recently defeated. This is one of the greatest affirmations of our freedoms that I can think of. The Constitution survived a frontal assault by people who wanted to use it for their own political agenda. You now have the right to stand on any street corner in America and burn the flag if, for example, that is the only way left for you to express your feelings of anger or disgust for this country or its policies. A right guaranteed by the very flag whose symbol it is! Burning the flag is abhorrent to many Americans but as long as we can do so, all our other freedoms are in safe keeping.

But I and a lot of other good Americans are disgusted with the actions of their government. Our government is not our country. Our "government" levies taxes, creates social policy, fights in undeclared wars, and in the case of capital punishment, murders in the name of us all. I am not less of a patriot for severely criticizing my government for any of these policies. Our "country" (and its founding documents) is the safe keeper of the greatest freedoms ever granted a governed people and for that I am eternally grateful. What I want is for this country, the last "superpower" on earth, to take its rightful place within the community of other great nations by abolishing capital punishment, a practice that disgraces us everywhere. Only then can we pursue with a clear conscience the cause of human rights everywhere.

No my dear Ms. Cerulean, I am not crusading for murderers, but really, more for people like you, who hold themselves up as ethical paragons but in truth have lost their moral compass. Spare the murderer not for the murderer's sake but for the greater cause of our and society's innate decency and goodness. If we are the civilized ones, we must set the high moral benchmark that compels us to spare human life even in ones so unworthy as an Oliver Cruz or a Gary Graham, just as surely as they and their kind would not! That is what marks the difference between them and us, and it is a burden that all civilized people must carry. Surely you can see what I am trying to say. If not us, WHO? Re-read your last post. How eager you are to see executions carried out! Your sympathy would not even extend to some hypothetical family member or loved one! Do you wonder that I oppose the death penalty? All too often, I have seen it make monsters out of otherwise decent people like you.

And that brings up a disturbing thought. If Bush is elected president, he will not be taken seriously by other world leaders. Can you imagine smirking little George sitting across the table from other truly mature leaders of the free world? It could take years before he establishes his credentials with our allies, if ever. And what about our would-be roving ambassador of good will, Dick Cheney. Could he ever go to South Africa and look Nelson Mandela in the eye, having bravely voted against his release from prison? Talk about a contrast in stature: Nelson Mandela, and the laughable weenie boy team of Bush and Cheney.

Agreed. We are way off topic here. And while BNB may have made himself unwelcome on this forum (I have not seen the offending post) his often very eloquent arguments against the death penalty should not be discounted. I may draw upon them in my own future posts against the death penalty. And by the way, an attack upon a poster's argument should not be confused with an attack upon the poster himself. This distinction should be obvious. But if anyone makes an argument that is illogical, contradictory, or just plain repulsive, then it is fair game for all the powers of rebuttal at my (or any other poster's) command. Again, this is not an attack upon the poster. Check your facts, your rhetoric, and your sense of common decency before you push the "post message" button.

As I have stated before on this forum, there is no need for personal attacks. But I have read the exchange of posts between you and BNB and I believe the name calling began with you. You referred to him as "Mr. No Balls" a "suck up", a "compassionless cretin," etc. Doc called him "a worthless piece of pig shit." My my, these are pretty naughty words for people who live in glass houses. The point is, if you don't want to be flamed, don't start flaming yourself.

Let's put this debate in prospective: some day (I hope within my lifetime) capital punishment will be banned in this country forever. It will go the way of slavery, child labor, germ warfare research and a host of other social evils that are the hallmark of a pathological society. Unfortunately, it may require the execution of hundreds of more people before Americans have had their gut full of it. By that time I fear the harm to the moral fiber of this country may be irreversible. More than crime, drugs, or pornography, capital punishment has corrupted the soul of America.

Please, Madame Cerulean, no more scenarios. What a lurid imagination you have! You've been watching too much L.A. Law or something! In time, I suspect, I will run out of ways of coping with your remorseless and self righteous attacks on all that is unholy in our land. I see that you are a gardener. Go out and eat a tomato, squash a few Japanese beetles, then take a cold shower. There are not enough days left to see your crusade through to its final crowning victory against the numberless devils and demons you have conjured up. You will be very busy indeed for a long time. And this is what I find so disheartening about your posts. You and the others (attention Tia Marie) are so ready to consign our society to the insatiable machinery of death. Once you have begun there will never be an end to it. Always, there will be enemies lurking, like a commie under every bed. However you rationalize it, it comes out a base and vile thing in the end. One day, capital punishment will be banished in this country for ever. I absolutely, positively guarantee that this will happen. Unfortunately, capital punishment has become for you a means without an end that betters us all. I can almost hear you whisper, "let there be more murders, that we may have more executions!" What will happen when you and Tia can no longer take up your knitting around the public place of execution, cheering as the head drops into the basket and patting yourselves on the back for having seen justice done!

Look. For the first time in almost a year, the Bush facade is finally crumbling. A whole year of unmitigated gall and smirking stupidity is unraveling. You want to know why? Because Bush's handlers have stumbled badly, so naturally Bush, the epitome of the "other directed" man, has stumbled too. The puppeteers have got their strings tangled, leaving poor George to flop around like the dressed up little dummy that he is. What a disgusting spectacle.

This old argument from the stand point of deterrence is a lost cause. Texas executes more people than any other state. If the DP were truly a deterrent, we should be seeing huge reductions in the murder rate. In the case of Dallas, one of the largest cities in Texas, just the opposite is true. I argue from a different perspective. By demonizing the criminal, it makes it that much easier for you to justify his murder er, that is, his execution. This is precisely what many murderers do to their victims. Dehumanizing them makes it easier to kill them. The state makes a pretty poor example for the rest of us. Until the law givers of this country make all human life inviolable, there will be no higher moral example to which we may look for an affirmation of our most cherished values. The death penalty may actually be causing an increase in the rate of murder.

Yeah, I too have felt a twinge of pity now and then for Bush. Like a prodigal son returning home to reverse the fallen fortunes of DAD, Bush resembles nothing so much as a blind man stumbling towards an uncertain destiny that others have crafted for him. In Bush's mind, he must win or lose all. His party, the nation, the world, and especially DAD, are all spectators in his mythical struggle for redemption. He has foreseen that if he loses, his descent into obscurity will be swift and sure. For him there will not even be the consoling joys of elder statesmanship, usually reserved for presidential losers, because he is no statesman and has no original ideas. No one will want his advice, or care to listen to his astute observations on foreign policy. Texans hate a loser and he will be quickly abandoned. So I understand Bush's desperation and ruthlessness, but that is also why he would make a terrible president and why I oppose him utterly and without reservation. Presidential campaigns are no place to find yourself. The presidency must always be reserved for those with high ideals and keen analytical minds, both indispensable in this chaotic world, and Bush has neither. So my pity tends to vanish pretty quickly. The stakes are just too damn high.

Correct. There's a growing perception that there is, indeed, something fundamentally wrong George W. Bush. Is he dyslexic? Is he arrogant and spoiled? Is he mentally ill? Or is he just plain stupid? Bush increasingly shows signs that he is incapable of coping with the complexities of a presidential campaign. His appearances on yesterday's news programs were simply appalling. He was pale, unfocused, and nearly incoherent. Having bobbed and weaved his way this far, he is finding out that there are no more refuges from a media that daily spotlights his incomprehensible bunglings. The pressure is on, and Bush is going soft like a bowl of soggy cornflakes. As far as I'm concerned, his policy differences with Gore are irrelevant. Bush, the man, is a pathetic, shambling wreck. He will need Colin Powell and other stronger men to prop him up and lend him the aura of leadership. But Bush the man will never lead us anywhere. He will only continue to confound us with his little-boy-lost stammerings. I look to Gore to administer the coup de gras during the debates so that Bush will never again think of running for higher office. What the hell is wrong with Bush? The undecided voters in this country had better find out before the election and vote accordingly. Presidential shoes are mighty big. George W. Bush can never fill them.

Dear Camiglia,

"Actually, Bush would probably make a competent, if not great president." Oh really? Maybe your keen analytical eye has seen something I haven't. I see the weakest, most laughable example of unearned privilege who wants the biggest unearned plum of all. Bush will never be presidential without his buddies Powell and Schwarzkopf there to lend him the aura of strength and respectability. And you with your love of language and great literature! Quick, how do you pronounce "subliminal"? Who is your favorite philosopher? Want to see the U.S. government plunge headlong into the messy business of capital punishment? And you can bet that an endorsement from you would only make a homophobic, anti-intellectual guy like Georgie boy cringe. It's okay if you're not voting for Gore. I may vote for Nader myself. But please, take a good look at this guy. Can you see him sitting across the table from a shrewd and cynical leader like Putin? Could Dick Cheney ever go to South Africa and look Nelson Mandela in the eye? I can state with near certainty that Bush will today make a shambles of logic and the English language. That does not bode well for the presidency or the country. Four years of Bush's little-boy-lost stammerings is a scary prospect. It should scare you to.

Yours,
mwmayer

Lazy-o with his pathetic little boy swagger is another Republican pig who thinks he is entitled to a seat in the Senate, the way Bush thinks he's entitled to the presidency. How shocked and confused they must be! How funny to hear their impotent little squeaks of dismay! They thought the impeachment would be Clinton's only legacy. Surprise! It's going to be their legacy. The mountain of bullshit they put us all through for a whole year has come to settle on their own unsubstantial roofs. What's that crashing sound? It's the sound of Bush and company being swept to oblivion on a tidal wave of filth.

Well, I'll tell you Mr. celador2, I could care less about the policy differences between Bush and Gore. It's Bush the man that I'm worried about. Bush could never be presidential without his buddies Powell and Schwarzkoph to lend him the aura of leadership, and to prop him up when he makes yet another assault on the English language. Bush the man will never lead us anywhere. All he'll do is continue to confound us and the rest of the world with his little-boy-lost stammerings. Can you see Bush sitting across the table from a shrewd and cynical guy like Putin? Could Dick Cheney with his unforgivably awful voting record ever go to South Africa and look Nelson Mandela in the eye? Bush simply and finally does not and cannot rise to the stature of a true world leader. Support Gore because he has a mind, whereas Bush has demonstrated time and again that he manifestly does not. Have I convinced you? Huh? Probably not. Republicans these days are content with mediocrity and are all to eager to inflict it on the rest of us.

Bush is discovering that the sides of a toilet bowl are too slippery to crawl out of. Cheney, of course, found this out long ago and has since given up as he floats serenely amongst the piss and turds like a bloated cow. Nothing can save them now. FLUSH. Welcome Gore, Lieberman, and America to a new era of sanity and decency.

Well, Mr. celador2, I know a lost cause when I see one. I'm not going try and convince you to vote for Gore. And if you and the entire Republican party leadership can't admit that Clinton has amply paid his debt to society, then that is what I meant by "people like you."

The Republicans could write a modern day version of "The Emperor's New Clothes," starring the stupidest man ever to run for president. Look at the ribbing Dan Quayle took for his few malapropisms. Bush has a list of them as long as your arm. See "The Complete Bushisms" compiled by Jackob Weisberg at http://www.salon.com. We Have Seen Bush Naked, and it is a Revolting Sight.

This is true. But it is certainly very curious. Karen Hughes has said that only top Bush "lieutenants" had excess to these tapes. There seems to be only two possibilities. One, this is a clumsy Republican attempt at planting incriminating material within the Gore organization (authorized by Hughes herself) , or two, there is a mole in the Bush organization. Either way, it does not bode well for the Republicans.

Sounds like a Republican plant if you ask me. If this material was "illegally obtained" and subsequently used by the Gore people, the Republicans could have made a huge and embarrassing fuss over it. More dirty tricks?

Yes, the founders of the world's great religions were humble people. It is their hubris maddened followers like Dr. Laura who have given religion a bad name. Are people so empty that they need a finger wagging philistine like her to give them direction in life? I have made reference several times on this and other forums to the classic study of human character, The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman. Here, you will find out why it is infinitely better to be an "inner directed man/woman" as opposed to an "other directed man/woman." "Inner directed" means you take your moral cues from a hard won, deeply valued set of beliefs, immune from ideology or propaganda. Religion is signpost pointing to a lifelong exploration of core human values, not an end in itself. Dr. Laura is nothing new. We have seen her kind so many times before. I am always astonished at how many people enjoy being brow beaten and humiliated by self styled evangelists like her. She obviously relishes this role of scolding martinet. Thanks, but I will abandon her amidst the dusty, worm eaten "other directed" homilies of a bygone era.

Oh I see. Well gosh! She's a doctor of something! Doesn't matter in what. This is a perfect example of the intellectual sloppiness of Bush lovers like you. It appears you are awed by titles alone, not substance. She could have a Doctorate in Sewage Treatment and you would still accord her the status of Wise One. But people like you love to be preached to by morally deficient creatures like "Dr." Laura. You are so eager to bow down and kiss her Gucci booted feet!

Don't make me laugh. Bush is an enthusiastic supporter of the death penalty, so please don't imply that he just might of commuted a death sentence if he had the power to do so. And the Texas Board of Parole and Probation is staffed by Bush appointees. Bush made sure they were all pro DP as a condition of appointment who would provide precisely the verdict that Bush would want in capital cases. He's such a coward. He can call himself a "compassionate conservative" while overseeing dozens of executions, and then claim its all the fault of the P&P Board who's members he personally hand picked. Never forget. George laughed while Karla Faye Tucker, a far better Christian than him, died. George will have a lot to answer for if he ever reaches those pearly gates.

I also belong to the I HATE BUSH FAN CLUB. Sure. Drop on by anytime. "Bush is the one who will restore integrity to the Oval Office, not Al Gore." How can he do that, when all he has is the borrowed integrity of others? Bush himself has no integrity. Having integrity implies a mind capable of reflection. I have never seen or heard a Bush pronouncement that demonstrated thought or introspection. Bush is a perfect example of the "other directed" man, as opposed to the "inner directed" man. In other words, a man who takes his moral and political directions from outside himself and not a core of deeply held ideals. See The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman for a full development of this theme. Government by cue-card is a pre-ordained failure.

Manspeas only wishes to bring to your obstinate attention the disgusting hypocrisy of W. and the shocking truth of his precipitous decline in the public opinion polls. Bush is going to lose this election. Not surprising. He's been a loser all his life.

Editor
The Washington Times

The Clintons exonerated. Thanks Washington Times (America's Toilet Paper), for filling the air with your outhouse effluvium over the last eight years. Here's a big "Thank you" to Wesley Pruden and his underwear fetish of a cartoonist Bill Garner. You guys are going to be VERY busy for the next four years! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mwmayer

The release of this report amply demonstrates the Republican Party's utter unworthiness to govern. History will record that never was there a more dirty partisan effort to unseat and discredit a president with one of the highest approval ratings in the last twenty years. How shall we repay them for the mountain of bullshit they've put us through? This report clears the way for a Gore-Clinton victory in November. I fervently hope the Repukes lose the House and Senate as well. They have earned the utter contempt of us all. Go Democrats, and let the Republicans slink back to their lair like foul things in the night.

Bravo. Ken Starr will forever be remembered as the little creep who pawed through a mountain of dirty underwear, clutching the most soiled ones to his face and breathing in deeply! Listen to him squeak in ecstasy! Look at Barr, Gingrich, Delay, Hyde and the rest of them masturbating furiously while reading Ken's report! They wanted to deny Clinton an honorable legacy. How ironic that their legacy will stink like rectal mucus for all posterity to gag on!

I want to see George and Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, William Bennett, Mary Matlin, Ralph Reed, Wesley Prudin, Cal Thomas, and Phyllis Schlafly stripped naked and bent over chairs with their lubricated assholes prominently displayed. Enter the king hell legion of ass fuckers with twelve inch barbed cocks, who sodomize them one at a time. Listen to them squeal!

There are three things George W. Bush must do before he gets my support:

1. He must do penance, real penance for his appearance at Bob Jones University. To this end, I purpose that the Governor be stripped to the waist and publicly flogged by Cardinal John O'Conner. Yes, Bush must be given the bastinado before I begin to feel even a teensy, weensy bit sorry for him.

2. He must make a pilgrimage to the grave site of Karla Faye Tucker, whose plea for mercy Bush made a mockery of, and beg on his bended knee for forgiveness. In addition, he must disband forever the villainous Texas Pardons and Parole board.

3. He must, as John McCain had the courage to do, renounce the odious religious right movement in its entirety.

If he will not submit to at least one of these conditions, then I say, let him be locked up in some infernal Men's Room from Hell, where he must perform the duties of a lavatory assistant for all eternity!

With John Ashcroft's approval of the closed circuit televising of McVeigh's execution, this country moves a little deeper into the quagmire of brutality and barbarism. What's next? Pay-per-view executions? This is precisely the foul degeneracy that countries which practice capital punishment fall into. And anyone who needs to witness the execution of another human being in order to achieve "closure" isn't much better than the person being executed. The no doubt good Christians in Oklahoma City who will flock to this disgusting spectacle like ancient Romans to a gladiatorial show have betrayed the teachings of their savior! Shame on them! And shame on all of us for letting the real benchmark of a civilized country, the inviolability of human life, fall into the gutter.

That many people are seriously debating whether or not to publicly televise McVeigh's execution shows us the filthy cesspool that Americans have fallen into because of capital punishment. More than drugs, pornography, or criminal violence, capital punishment has destroyed the moral fiber of this country. Anyone who requires the witnessing of an execution in order to achieve "closure" is no better than the person being executed. And I bet they're all good Christians in Oklahoma City. If so, they have betrayed the teachings of their Savior! Watch McVeigh die, take comfort from it, and you will be forever dirtied and your religion profaned! I myself plan to be as far away as possible from all sources of news media on May 16th. Execution as entertainment? Good-bye, America.

This is typical of the sort of misrepresentation that advocates of the death penalty like to indulge in. Does episcojew really think that spending the rest of your life getting fucked in the ass, beaten, stabbed, spit upon and intimidated is just a peachy keen way of ending up? Even with their few, pathetic amenities, lifers in a supermax prison are, indeed in a dark and fearsome hell, far worse than the quick escape of death by lethal injection. Death, my dear episcojew, is most certainly not the most ominous of all things.

Yes, they get three squares a day. Or do you purpose that we starve them to death? As for the choice of death or a lifetime of involuntary anal intercourse and mandatory blow jobs, enforced by a three hundred pound sadistic, AIDS infected, sexual predator, I would gladly choose death. These things are happening in every prison in America every day, and if you don't know any better, you are worse than naive. You are malicious for propagating this moronic, sing-song version of prison-as-motel-suite-with-TV-and-room-service hogwash. The thing that frightens me about people like you, Madame episcojew, is that you are so close to taking a kind of primitive delight in torture and debasement. This does not recommend itself to enlightened civilization. If you and I don't set an inviolable value on human life, who will? John Wayne Gacy? Yes, let's put certain criminals away forever. They are truly punished and our hands are not stained with their blood.

{{....but my point is, that for many of them, life on the inside is much better than their life on the outside where they didn't have food, water, heat or air, cable television or computers.}}

This "life is better in prison" argument just boggles my mind. I have heard it so many times from the pro-death crowd. And yes, I guarantee you that I know more about life in prison than you do. Life in prison is the never ending monotony of rigidly imposed routine. It is the systematic destruction of everything basic to human happiness. It is life measured out one monotonous day after another forever, in the case of life without parole, combined with the daily terror of defending against rape and murder. No amenity like a lousy fucking TV or computer can ever makeup for that. It is a fearful punishment that fits the crime of murder, that we ourselves don't become murderers. Put away your Uncle Wiggly books episcojew and admit what any thirteen year old could tell you: life in prison is a brutal and terrifying affair.

{{As for "setting an inviolable value on human life," their life lost that value when they took the life of another.}}

Oh really? And just who the hell are you to decide when a human life no longer has value? Don't we, as a Christian country, surrender that prerogative to a higher authority? You go by the name "episcojew". I assume you are Jewish. Isn't it instructive that Israel, one of the most beleaguered countries on earth, has abolished the death penalty? This in a country that experiences deadly mortar attacks and suicide bombers on a daily basis. What does that tell you about humility and restraint? About abiding with the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law? Modern Israel is a young nation, but thousands of years old spiritually. We would be wise to follow her example.

Your the one leading a sheltered life, madam episcojew. Here's an excerpt from a book entitled Going Up The River by Joseph Hallinan. Don't take my word for the terrible reality of prison life; read this book. Hallinan is speaking of a single prison, Pelican Bay in Crescent City, California. "Pelican Bay inmates have had their arms broken, their eyes gouged out, their brains splattered." Sounds like fun.

So, you are willing to admit that at least one prison in America is not the equivalent of a Club Med Caribbean cruise. I submit that all supermax prisons, built to house the most violent criminals in our midst, are substantially the same. In a review of the book I mentioned, Going Up The River by Joseph Hallinan, Michael Massing made the following comment. "Each prison Hallinan visits seems to feature its own form of depravity. At the state prison at Corcoran, Calif., rival gang members were pitted against each other in 'human cockfights' while guards placed bets. At the Ad Seg section of the McConnell unit in Beesville, Tex., up to a dozen assaults occur every day, and guards wear safety glasses to protect them from the feces, urine, and food that are regularly hurled at them." Hallinan comments that conditions at most of the supermax prisons he visited "press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate." The common practice of solitary confinement, AKA administrative segregation, "drives many to the brink of madness" according to Hallinan. My point? Life without parole in one of these facilities is worse than an easy out execution. Want to punish a murderer? Send him or her to a supermax and ban capital punishment for the sake of our own humanity.

I simply wish to dispel, once and for all, this notion that prisons are nice, cushy places where condemned murderers are sent to live the life of Riley, only to be paroled in a year or two. I do not approve of rape or murder as acceptable conditions of prison life, but they happen, which makes a prison sentence highly undesirable, and the consequential loss of freedom the worst punishment of all. Murder in prison is not the same as capital punishment. And life without parole means just that-you will die in prison. My priorities are simple: abolish the godamned death penalty forever! Every other civilized country has done so without a stratospheric increase in violent crime and so can we. Then we can then address with a clear conscience the human rights violations in other countries as well as our own.

So, Jesus Christ approves and indeed upholds the "lawfulness" of capital punishment? Wow. I am just amazed at the way some Christians twist the mission of Christ to suit their own unchristian beliefs. The deliberate, premeditated taking of a human life is murder no matter how you try to rationalize it. Christ, himself a victim of capital punishment, asked God to forgive his executioners as he died on the cross. And how can you read the Sermon on the Mount and conclude that somehow, in the gentle words of Jesus, he was encouraging death (murder) by electrocution, gassing or shooting? Love your enemy? Turn the other cheek? What on earth do you suppose he meant by these words? And why should I, a non-Christian, have to remind you of them?

Being from Texas, home of the Butcher of Huntsville (better known as George W. Bush), I wouldn't expect you to sympathize with anti-death penalty sentiments. I will lay aside the insults and even apologize, but I will leave you with this one thought: some day, capital punishment will be banned in this country forever. It will go the way of slavery, child labor, and all the other social ills that a truly civilized country learns to get rid of for the sake of its own humanity. The rest of the civilized world has, and so can we. I would prefer to stick around and help the process along. And by the way, Thou Shalt Not Kill seems pretty unambiguous to me.

Hi Jenny,
Fortunately, this sort of degenerate filth can be safely laughed off. Unfortunately, the spark of simple human decency you once may have possessed has curdled into rotten human excrement. I pity your shit filled soul.

I repeat: Christians who believe in capital punishment have betrayed the teachings of Jesus Christ! As for execution as entertainment, souvenir hawkers have already applied for licenses to sell their slimy, god awful trinkets outside the place of execution. Aren't you proud of yourselves? You are the idiot my friend, a drooling, depraved idiot at that like the majority of you Christian hypocrites who go to church on Sunday and carry out executions on Monday. In the larger scheme of things, it is people like you who disgrace America. Why don't YOU leave?

Okay. I have apologized to TXCop, even though the name calling started with him.

As to the points of your last two posts, anyone who sees the hand of Christ in the burnt and bloodied result of an execution by electrocution has profaned his teachings far more than the worst atheist. Christ called on God to forgive his executioners. Does a Christian today dare do less? In the larger scheme of things, dare any of us? And people who split hairs between the meaning of "kill" and "murder" are wandering about in a semantic haze from which nothing fine or uplifting will ever come. As I observed before, contemporary Jews have abolished capital punishment. They have, as few nations have today, the hindsight of two thousand or more years. Perhaps we should approach the elders of Israel today and ask them why they have gone from a people who once enthusiastically carried out capital punishment (as we do) to ones who do not. Could it be that they saw the soul destroying contradiction between the letter of the law (stone the adulterer) and the spirit of the law (restraint leading to harmony within the commonweal)? That is why I am absolutely certain America will one day ban the death penalty. We well begin to trace the source of our moral disintegration (as a more mature society once did) to the repulsive and flagrant violation of our most deeply held values, one of which must be the inviolability of all human life, regardless of how unworthy we have judged it to be! Israel is not a good enough example? Okay, try the rest of the civilized world. Capital punishment is our worst human rights violation. It disgraces us everywhere. No further progress in the shaping of an enlightened civilization is possible until we ban it from our midst.

{{Look, I never said he presided over anything. All I said is he never condemned capital punishment. He even said himself that he came to uphold and fulfill the laws of Moses, and not to destroy them.}}

But wasn't Christ's very mission upon this earth a condemnation of capital punishment? This is Falwell's argument: that just because Christ did not condemn capital punishment from the cross, he was somehow giving it his tacit approval. Once again, you are in the position of portraying Christ nodding in approval at the burnt and bloody mess of an electrocution. Woe betide any Christian who takes an imposter like this as their personal savior! How can anyone read the Sermon on the Mount and conclude that Christ is just another cop on the beat, enforcing, not the laws of Moses, but the laws of America that are contrary to everything he stood for?

{{If you had read my post, you would have seen that G-d commanded man not to murder, but he also commanded an eye for an eye. Leaving capital punishment acceptable.}}

An absolutely devastating contradiction. This one statement alone lays bare the tangled and confused reasoning of so many of you pro DP folks. I repeat: the deliberate, pre-meditated taking of another human life is murder, and no law of God, man or the big kahuna in the sky can make it otherwise. It is the only moral imperative I subscribe to, and from it all other civilized virtues flow. Take it away, and you have hot dog stands outside the places of execution. You have disrespect for other life forms on this planet and a cheapening of our capacity for reverence. Are you proud of what the death penalty is doing to the moral fiber of this country? Don't we have enough state sanctioned violence in the form of TV, movies, and video games? Look at some of the posts from a few of the pro DP folks in this forum. I refer to raventears, atawood2, and ladylark100. Re-read some of their posts and ask yourself if you would want sadistic creatures like them representing the best our society has to offer. I'm sorry to discover that many of your responses give aid and comfort to their vile opinions. Do you wonder why I oppose the death penalty? All to often, I have seen it make monsters out of otherwise decent people like you.

{{Murder cannot be LEGAL.}}

Correct. So please quit justifying it in the name of religion. Capital punishment cannot be reconciled with the spirit any religion worthy of the title. Actually, I would prefer to move this entire discussion out of the religious domain.

{{ All Jews in the homeland speak with one voice in their opposition to the death penalty.}}

By this I mean that the majority of the Jewish people are opposed to the death penalty or it would not be so. Israel is a democracy, right? Banning of the death penalty there reflects the hard won collective wisdom of an older, more mature society. How extraordinary that it comes from a people who have suffered two thousand years of persecution and genocide, of which Americans know not a farthing. Can you imagine the existence of a gas chamber in Israel? That is what I mean!

{{How interesting since a good number of Christians, Jews, etc. in this country feel capital punishment is perfectly acceptable and should not be abolished. Who's religion may I ask you is this a prominent issue of?}}

Any religion that appeals to our baser instincts is not worthy of the title. Demonstrate to me how executions uplift our spirit and make us worthy architects of a wholesome and enlightened society which is, after, all the true purpose of religion. Recall the images of burnt and bloodied human flesh before you give your reply. And by the way, madam episcojew, please try to contain your LOLs. If you think this is a laughing matter I suggest you start a Bozo the Clown Club where people like TEXcop and raventears can paint their faces and mug from the peanut gallery.

{{Not saying that he gave his blessing over the death sentence, but he made no effort to save the two men being crucified with him. He had all the power to do so, but all he said was "Truly I say to you, you will be with me today in Paradise."}}

So, Christ was supposed to pull off one last miracle as he died on the cross? I can just see the Roman soldiers watching in amazement as Christ and the two thieves step down off their crosses and walk off arm and arm into the sunset. I don't think so. I'm not a Christian so I can't explain this too well, but I think it has to do with the promise Christ makes to all who believe in Him of eternal life in paradise. And by the way, only one of the thieves gets to walk through the pearly gates. The other was kind of a scab.

{{If it is such an unchristian cause, how come Christians are so divided in their beliefs on it? If it were truly unchristian, all Christians would be against it. To be honest, I have met very few Christians that didn't support the death penalty.}}

All this proves is that some Christians are not persuaded by the example of compassion that Christ represents. By some perversity of temperament or upbringing, they have sadly missed the fundamental point of the religion they profess. You are at liberty to interpret the Bible as you chose. I myself do not draw spiritual sustenance from it so I will defer a bit to those who do. But I still must profess astonishment and dismay at how some Christians have mangled the Christian message of "love thy neighbor" to read..."unless he commits murder. Then you may gas him, electrocute him, shoot him or inject him with lethal chemicals......" Turn the other check? Forgive those who use you despitefully? What do you suppose Christ meant by these words? It's not as though you Christians look upon capital punishment as a grim and unfortunate duty. How eager you are to see executions carried out! For those of us who do not profess to be religious, but merely reverential, it is most disheartening.

{{My complete opinion of your post is: You interpret your religion the way you like, and I will interpret mine as I see fit. PERIOD.}}

Fine. But don't pretend to be an exemplar of the highest virtues of which your religion is capable. As for verbally ripping my arguments to shreds, well gosh just go ahead and try, miss terrible episcojew. You haven't done a very good job so far.

{{Wow! There are millions upon millions of very uninformed Christians then. I think more likely, you are just intolerant of any ones beliefs but your own, and will attack anything that stands in the way of your beliefs. Even if it includes attacking the value of other's religious beliefs. Quite sad actually.}}

Millions and millions? I doubt it. If so, Christianity is doomed. Maybe all three of the monotheistic religions, come to think of it. And I'm not attacking anyone. I am attacking one of the strangest delusional systems ever hatched by the human mind. I freely admit to despising it thoroughly.

{{You yourself have commented about how horrible life is in prison. You yourself have stated that murders happen every day in prison. Do you value the lives of the other prisoners so little that you are going to put another murderer in their midst, thereby jeopardizing many more lives than just his own?}}

Put an end to the death penalty, our most flagrant human rights violation, and then we can address other violations of human rights, like murder and rape in prison. It is fatuous to give a thought for the safety of a prison inmate if we are counting down the days to his execution.

I have been informed by Yahoo that I may have violated the Terms Of Service (TOS) incumbent upon all club members. I freely confess to having violated said terms. I am referring to the anti-Bush "clubs" run by your scum bags in residence, Howard Pearlman (howardpearlman) and Tom Whitmore (colbushwhacker). While I fully support their right to start any club they want on any subject, they do NOT have the right to bombard me with unwanted, offensive spam advertisements for their degenerate "clubs." I have asked, repeatedly, and for months of these two individuals, to cease and desist their e-mail solicitations, and yet I continue to receive them. I therefore reserve the right to heap the utmost filth and abuse upon their heads until they, or the august administrators of Yahoo, do so. Here are the "clubs" that I wish unequivocally to be removed from, if I ever made the mistake of joining them in the first place: I HATE Bush FAN CLUB; THE I HATE Bush FAN CLUB; ANY "club" run by Harold Pearlman (howardpearlman) or Tom Whitmore (colbushwhacker). The email address that I wish to remain immaculate from these two morons is: m.mayer2@verizon. If you can not or will not perform this simple task, I will continue to besmirch their club postings with the meanest, filthiest things I can think of.

Yours,
mwmayer

....er, Condit that is. Why wouldn't he be a suspect now more than ever? He suddenly realized that his entire golden boy career was now at the mercy of smitten, naive young intern who thought he would marry her. Powerful men like Condit have murdered for a lot less then that.

What Condit seems not to have realized is that his four months of silence pretty much destroyed him. And everything he now says and does is shifty and weird. Look at the lengths he went to keep just this situation from developing. Now everything has spilled out like an over turned garbage can.

Well, if he did have her contracted out he probably figured her story would just fade out like they mostly do. He didn't count on Aunty Zamora. With Chandra out of the way, he could get back to his less talkative lady friends, free of the fear of blackmail.

Condit displays all the attributes of the backsliding Christian: guilt, shame, evasiveness, and hostility. In Condit's loony brain, someone else, not he, is responsible for his troubles. Case in point: he is now trying to make Connie Chung the scapegoat for an aggressive and skeptical media.

The Catholic Church is the oldest and most ruthless criminal enterprise in the history of humanity. It has murdered more people than the Nazis, the Fascists, the Communists, the Imperialists and the Mafia put together. Human filth like Bernard Law don't happen by accident. He and hundreds like him are nurtured at the bosom of Mother Church and are then taught to lie, prevaricate, and dissemble. It's called Catholic apologetics. The Church has been doing it for centuries: blame the victim, then destroy him. Protect Mother Church at all costs. Now, I hope the cost will be the slow, agonizing descent into utter annihilation. Children of the world rejoice: the Pope and his merry band of sodomites are toppling into the jaws of Hell.

All we have left is ruined splendor. All that pick tools and whisk broom uncover - lost inscriptions, forgotten endearments, fragments of a manuscript we now recognize as a letter to one who broke our heart in the nineteen eighties. All that dust and time have effaced - ancient sorrows we thought we had buried, never to be revisited, take on new form and body forth as you my friend whom I thought I had put away. Sifting like scholars through the detritus - a tarnished silver ring, a broken tie clasp.

night of the full moon:
tasting the
wild ginger root

low rumble
almost inaudible
the winter furnace

standing in the canoe
wind at my back
down the Summer creek

The edible nuts and fruits, cultivated, selected out by our forebears, made assessable to nourishment by discarding the shell, pealing away the integument, chewing away the flesh and spitting out the seed, to say nothing of those things made serviceable to our diets by fermentation and dehydration - a grammar of foodstuffs, a lexicon of human delectation.

When I think of you,
my heart melts with tenderness,
yet I fear too much tenderness
like the cherry blossom
fears a Spring come too soon
before Winter's final thaw.

Let us reach out then
across the space that divides us

Our mere body's half heat
kindle the other half in each
and our two body's warmth, as one,
need fear no winter,
long in leaving.

Bear Pen Creek Mandala

l.
That wind and breath are one
come
crashing down mountain side

waterfalls
of wind

cascades
of
windy
breath

snatched away and
given back
moist humors of earth
pillowed on
old oak and bracken
pulverized by starlight
and dusky
hurtling
night winds
from up thar hills
limb and leaf shaken skewers
of haughty breezes
(high winds)

2.
Settled leaves startle,
rise up like feathers

floating
crashing

sailing out of
earshot
moist
humors of breath
commingling,
snatched away in whirlwinds
of starlight and musk
vast mountain storehouse
pounding river rock
to sand

dust

molecules

atoms

4.
pounding river of stars and
old leaf-litter
booming night winds
and
cascading
breath

made
visible

each settled leaf
leaps up on a
skewer of
twisting winds to
braided twisting ribbons
of leaves
rising
towards the
branches they were
weaned from.

5.
Out on the night of wind
hurtling showers of leaf and debris
a mountain of wind
the storehouse keepers have
loosed an
avalanche of dervish breezes
that bore
down
the rain
that
scooped out this valley

Shakes you!
holds steady
then
Shakes you again!

A windy buffeting embrace
that shakes you
in a whirlwind of leaves
an avalanche of wind
bearing down
on
its
own
nothingness

Slams the breath into you!
Pulls it back out!

and
with
startled
animal cry

leaps

through a
whirlpool of stars

promises only,
no becalment.

6.
Brother sister
echo of
water and wind
the hills
grandfathered by time
spawning rivers
that pound rocks
calved from mountains

a prism of stars
sharp as a shaman's knife
a startled animal's cry

this night
anathema to
silence
a mere
infant
struggles
to learn
what he
already
knows.

7.
Stranded beach
swoons
startled caress

fulminating

sickle moon
on another
continent too
the
nocturnal passage
of migratory birds
evinced from their
beginningless past,
wing beats that
drum the night,
the embryonic
steadfast
hold-of-no-loss
assurance
promising only

no arrival

the boundary
of flesh and feather
promising only

no containment

A scooping out of
crescent moon
with each beat, the
trumpeter's nestling,
egg hatched in
an old growth forest
rides the old
gene map of
continent immemorial
as familiar as
b r e a t h i n g.

8.
Pooling eyes at
dusk the
predator come to
see what's for dinner

quiet no look
of all seeing
all sensing

ready to pounce,
motley dappled
coat counterfeits
movement of
wind blown branch
invisible at rest,
eating up and down
the food chain
oh
happy beast!
Supping at the table
of the grandfathers.

9.
The trespassed cordons of
boundaryed off demesne,
old growth
pinioned and weeping,
the whispered procurement
of old standing
old loss
in the
tumbled
down
ruins
betokening substrate
of a chided people,
limning the story
in a wordless palsy of
breathless embattlements

no containment

harbinger and
death rattle at
doors that creak slowly
inward a
life stream of
smoky water snakes
through shifting magma
continents to a
shattered bowl
of seas.

10.
Myself as desolation
my partner a
broken
wordless
vastation
of hurry homeward
latitudes in
meridians of
lost delight

We sail this barque
on a gathering of seas
shipping water
throwing bread to the fish
looking with horror
into lightless depths a
promise of

no boundaries

No chosen vessel
but here to sink
in watery consummation

all hands all hope.

11.
Probing leaf litter
in a world that
asks no questions but
hurls them gently back
yes and.......?
yes and.......?

Probing leaf litter
darkness falling
last of birdsong,
leaves barely a-flutter
the time of dusk
between
one star
and
ten billon
who can teach me the way of the pipe?

Probing leaf litter
striking
root
I look up at
the mountain
silhouetted
in the
northern sky
and dream
of holding
Michelle a
single heart
pulsing
from genitals to fingertips.