SPICE IS THE PRICE

11:50pm:

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLID 'TUDE

"So how long have you been here?"
"A few months now."
"Ah, yes..." a knowing pause; "the boys do like it when they first get to China".

Of course, she could mean aboslutely anything; indeed, I play it naive when I end the conversation soon thereafter, failing to take the cue for... what response exactly? High-fives and a grunt, or maybe devil horns in the air and a falsetto squeal? Maybe I am reading too much into things: maybe 'boys' is just a nongendered euphemism and she really is talking about the sensual delights to be found in the captivating clash of architectural nuance, the delectable food, the ceaseless opportunities for exploration... no, it can't be. There is something written in the lines of that lascivious smile, some impish twinge to the gravitas of this accent I have otherwise only heard reading news latenight on CBC one.

Not everyone is so diplomatic when they make assertions playing off the same unfortunate riff; at a bar, some longhair cracker starts a conversation by sitting down next to me and muttering, as if a taciturn veteran imperfectly trying to recall one particular air raid out of several indistinguishable horrors, "The chicks, man... the chicks". Slight side-to-side shake of the head.

I do not need to go far to hear the rumours, distilled as they are through whatever human filter is talking at me at the moment: tales of indulgence told in past or future tense by presently lonely men, moral high-horsing barked shakily by the self-perceived threatened, way-to-go camaraderie amongst drunk honkies - the message is clear, China is a sexual free-for-all, price of admission one "first world" passport.

But is this anywhere near true? One notices that the celebratory high-fives are exchanged exclusively amongst those ghostly groups exclusively gringo who from time to time hover through the city, 'x' and 'y' chromosomes therein consistently at a 1:1 ratio from the moment they enter the bar to the moment they depart.
Could it be that this phenomenon is only spoken of, some gasping meme too tenacious to be put down: some cabal of horny dongbei expats many years back met in a porn theatre to ritualistically will the notion of Manchurian sex tourism into being, someone fucked up on the incantation and the demon has just been deceiving their ideo-situational heirs ever since?

Perhaps I got a little closer to solving the mystery one night when I was ambushed at the bar by some cracker who, after walking me through the details of his anime collection, mistakenly attempted to foster a little camaraderie by patting me on the back and saying "You and me, we'll have dates by the end of the week". The word "dates" is the lynchpin in that sentence, the one that describes precisely why freewheeling Manchuria does not seem so wild to a libertine like myself - is this what these people were talking about all along? They just wanted to play that old game? Freakiness used in some reverse-metonymy to refer to the social values at play in a 1950's-era box social, sex invoked by the horny to refer only to its potential: the semantics of nervous embarassment: Squaresville - where people still "go on dates" and "break up", where they get "dumped" or "engaged". It's not saturnalia, it's a place where a fellow of low social skills has a slightly greater chance of going out to dinner with someone and discussing in halting lingua franca what their jobs are like and how cute their pets are - a slightly greater chance because he believes all of the rumours.

IT TAKES A NATION OF BILLIONS TO HOLD IT BACK

Squaresville - human relations ratiocinated until a 'phone number' is a unit sought, it implies step one, it is quantifiable. How many did you get tonight? How many people have asked you for yours? "Oh you know, there've been a few women on the street, but I always tell them I don't have a phone..."

Squaresville - interactions divided into strictly delineated 'dates'. Running from cops, real or imaginary, is not considered an appropriate way to spend them.

Squaresville - hypothetical distinctions between hypothetical genders become ruling constellations. Codespeak is employed, messages are deliberately obfuscated. During these negotiations there will be times when you will need to bluff your opponent. We are trying to cross the wires - squaresville. No safe harbour sought in the arms of the great cosmic improbability of another freak who perhaps 'gets' you, who you feel conversation is even conceivable with - that fear is not to be revealed here.

Squaresville - where the border between friends and lovers is strung with barbed wire and grimacing sentries, squinting in the setting sun - such a strong fortification it threatens to sap the fun out of either.

Squaresville - where lovers jealously conspire to hide their darkness from one another, as well as their light.

SYZYGY 4 U AND ME

Surely an expat making a claim about a host culture is really only going to be revealing any kind of noteworthy or useful information about one person, and we all know who that is. One cannot sanely make a statement about the binding characteristics found in a nation of 2 billion, one can only look for the kinds of patterns they are most capable of identifying in the noise. So it goes when expat golem perceives a surfeit of sex, so it goes when I (expat golem prototype recalled for safety issues) mumble about "conservative" values. "China is a strange synthesis of the greatest heights of old Eastern culture and the lamest bullshit of modern Western culture", I have likely irritated everyone by observing, followed by a comment on how this is exemplified by contrasting the captiating music of the Peking opera with the ubiquitous syrupy techno... and shouldn't a nation containing millions of guitar players end up with a Jimi Hendrix sooner or later?

But is it that explicable? America but without the perpetuated national myth of the 'sixties', no psychedelics to rally around, no hazy recollections revealing a dream dismantled (possibly because during that "explosion" half of the nation was being starved out by a syphilitic dictator)? That can't be it... that is just a part of it... that only explains a part of it... one 1.6-billionth of it, to be precise, the part pecking at this keyboard right now. And that's only if you don't count the rumoured water, the hypothetical trees, the stones.

4:43pm:

BUREAUCROMANCY

I was recently involved in some contract negotiations with the company which I am now going to be working for until the spring. Every time we have to stoop to smear ourselves in bureaucracy a little narrative unfolds in its officious vocabulary; thanks in part to the exhaustively linear nature of the world of lineups and forms, a tale is spun wherein plot devices are revealed, events from the past influence events in the future, sudden unexpected setbacks are encountered and dealt with, eventually this interlinked series of situations culminates in one outcome or another. Throughout any red-tape saga there is conflict and resolution, plotted over rising action and denouement; is there perhaps some way to read these archetypes?

Let me propose the divinatory science of bureaucromancy: One consults a bureaucromantic oracle with a nagging question one wants answered. The oracle meditates on the problem until receiving a divinatory flash explaining which bureaucratic process they are then to undergo - to attempt to get a partial refund on a province-issued sturgeon fishing license, for example, or to try to get municipal permission to add a water feature to their lawn. The oracle then goes through all of the steps necessary until the proposition's completion (e.g. until the papers pushed meet certain success or certain failure), recording along the way every form that exchanged hands, every telephone call made and/or missed, every item needing clarification, every signature, the angle of incidence at which every stamp falls on every piece of paper, et cetera et cetera. Finally, tnterpreting this process as one might scattered tea leaves, a prophetic dream or the flightpath of a flock of birds, the bureaucromancer produces their reasoned and prescient reply.

That being said, I wish to share a tale of a bureaucromantic tulpa.

I had been worried about re-signing my contract ever since, at a pompous and exhausting 'general meeting' (five hours in a conference hall, the theme to 'National Geographic's Wild Kingdom' playing over the speakers on a loop which quite literally repeated ceaselessly the entire time, the CEO breaking down in tears during his prolix speech upon speculating how "proud" his still-living father must be of him) a powerpoint slide suggested that a colleague of ours was being honoured for having the cunning business savvy to dream up an idea so radical as revoking bonuses from employees - that is to say, some enterprising Greenspan among the lower berths of the company hierarchy proposed that they could save more by paying their employees less. That they would have the gall to slyly make that announcement on a screen flashed to the full complement of the staff (indeed, attendance was mandatory) seemed more than a little troubling; as I was to go in for negotiations the next day, I began rehearsing speeches in my head - 'I won't sign again unless the contract remains identical to the one I signed in the first place, I will not accept any cuts, it will cost you more to find some new stooge to fill my so-called position than it will to pay me off', et cetera et cetera.

On the day of these interactions, I leveraged my point by pretending to 'accidentally' tell my manager that I was negotiating with some other business. I picked one at random off the internet, some wild west one-room schoolhouse in remote Xinjiang, the kind of place I actually would like to end up at sooner or later but have no actual connection to now. This choice was meant to accomplish two things; to bluff them into accepting the terms I wished to propose, and to suggest that I am the kind of maverick who would willingly fuck off to some Kazakh desert on a whim. Long story short, one of my many feints ended up working and I'm signed again with better terms. So it goes.

A few days go by, and I find myself in a taxi with the office recruiter, bullshitting about this and that. A pause, we're both scrounging for some new topic to introduce, he beats me to the punch:

"Oh, by the way, your friend contacted me."

"My friend?"

"Maybe not your friend, maybe just your classmate. He said you told him to ask me for a job."

"Oh, is this Dave?"

"No... not Dave... do you know a guy named Simple?"

"Simple?"

"Yeah; Simple Ton. When he introduced himself I had to hold back my laughter on the phone. I thought maybe this was a nickname, but that's what it said on all the official-looking documents he sent. He said he studied with you in Victoria."
"I think I would remember a Simple Ton; he studied linguistics?"

"That's what he said. He's from Cameroon. Cameroonian-American, he says, but no American passport."

"Huh..." - I rack my mind for possibilities, I wonder why the mention of 'Cameroon' has triggered certain concentrated strands of essence of deja vu to course through my mind.

"Can you guess where he's working? That Xinjiang school you had applied with."

A certain palpable dread; what is this shaping up to be? I cannot reveal the extent of this synchronicity to someone connected with my company, because to do that would suggest that I had only just CLAIMED to apply there. I hold back all the surveillance and interconnectivity fantasies that my mind has lately been such fecund ground for, and restrain myself to saying "Strange... I don't know him."

To the recruiter, this is a satisfying if humourous answer. "Hah... he must have just logged onto his boss' computer and read up on you from your e-mails, then. Trying to get an easy in." With that explanation, he is satisfied - and why wouldn't he be?

Trying to express my desire with jocularity instead of metaperverse fascination: "So he's clearly an enterprising guy, and you should hire him at once."

"Unfortunately I can't; this province doesn't allow workers from Cameroon".

And that is as far as the conversation goes. Coincidence is a lot less co-incidental in a nation nearing two billion; what kind of message am I being sent here? Someone working in the remote central Asian school that I only pretended to be considering employment at seems to know who I am, where I've been, where I am now and where I intend to be in the future, possibly better than I do. Any speculations are welcome, as all speculations are doubtless correct in some sense (incorrect in some other sense, correct AND incorrect in some other sense, we all know this old chestnut by now...).

Every action, as our pal said, has an equal and opposite reaction. With the aetheric 'middle' of the middle kingdom as the fulcrum, I can imagine myself in the far east and Simple in the far west as these figures unwittingly paired (or unwittingly for me, anyway), matched in give-and-take across the Mongolian plateau. He already knew who his double was, has gently tugged the right wire and sent a brief bureaucromantic signal (e.g. perhaps he didn't really intend to get HIRED here) to ensure that I am aware of his presence as well. Let's sit in lotus and read the strands: deception (me, as I used his school) versus good intentions (him, as he used mine); unqualified success (I got rehired) versus unwarranted failure (he can't get hired in Liaoning). Needless obfuscation versus the 'simple'; and in China, where the incessant streetside catcalling of children makes that kind of thing stand out even after we've spent the last few hours in our apartment undergoing ego-dismantling and forgetting all about it, black versus white. Who is this guy and why does he want me to know that he knows me, and that I know him?

Or maybe I have just been idle for so long that some frustrated archon has had to slap itself in the forehead and drop a metaphysical quest on my lap. The likelihood of my relocation to Xinjiang is steadily increasing, and I know who I must seek out once I am there... and fortunately, he has a very memorable name.

10:54pm:

KNOW YOUR COMPLEX

Somewhere along the line, I became immured in what the pathologists, in one of theseveral taxonomic missteps consequent of that one great mistake of believing the mind could map itself out using only the tools characteristic of its most rationalistic right-brain faculties, call 'magical thinking'. How or why this happened can be speculated on indefinitely; according to some paradigms a pretty conclusive answer can be established (at least, conclusive enough for a medical professional to proclaim "case dismissed"). However, though I have recently allowed myself to come to terms with writing in public with a 'personal' voice instead of one buried beneath layers nonsensical and mischievous, the line, as ever, is drawn at self-psychoanalysis. Let's just say it 'happened', and get on with it.

How the transformation from a relatively 'rationalist' youth devoted to not much more than playing rock music to the kind of moony-eyed gadabout who feels the need to slap himself in the forehead whenever he realizes he has used "is" in a sentence took place is anyone's guess. Any number of forces social, environmental, cultural, media-related, internal, biological, chemical, linguistic (for is living in a universe described by such a recherche map not the fate of anyone who draws their proclaimed interest in semantics into realms not strictly academic?) could be held to blame. Perhaps the fact that a 'transformation' took place is enough; having experienced transformation, the first accidental ego dissolution triggers a sequence of attempts at deliberate refinements of the process. "Transformation" itself, once actualized, becomes one of the big and versatile game pieces to be fussed over in alchemical furnaces sometimes literal, sometimes figurative, but generally both simultaneously. From the veracity of transformation spring more semantic primes, encoded in 64 hexagrams, the Icosadyad, correlates planetary and astral, all still considered if only out of some grandfather clause, all bearing some synecdochal relationship to the universe, or lack thereof, or the universe AND lack thereof.

Or maybe it was fated; as a child, I recall very clearly and precisely the moment when I spontaneously realized that the universe must operate following certain principles that I later learned to be cutesy chestnuts of quantum physics, that in an infinite expanse every conceivable thing must exist in infinite qualities, and that time "feels" like one great singularity which is only experienced as linear by hardware insufficient to accept some great unbound simultaneity. This made intuitive sense then, but I cannot quite manipulate the notion with such ease now; infinite feels like it could mean infinite void just as well as it could mean infinite possibility. However, between that very concise moment at age nine and today my brain has been fricassed with enough sex, drugs, rock & roll and formal education that the profound tragedy illustrated in that exchange, of everything for nothing, is just a mnemonic for the tale of growing up in a [pick your favourite political demon, make it adjectival like you're writing a mad lib of despair] society.

Explaining whatever routes I have followed since slipping away from the rational would seem insane in writing; writing is a very concrete thing, despite the arbitrary illogic of language its permanency seems to fill it with this gravitas not present in capricious speech. I do not have the verbal skill to explain what has happened casually, and I do not have the patience to come up with reams of subtle interlinked metaphors exploring consciousnesses inner and outer, bludgeoning one into adeptness through overexposure like a sloppy 16th-century natural philosopher wigging out on mercury poisoning.

The justification plucked squarely out of Hod, the one that I can give to whatever friends have been put off by my unceasing descent into madness, is that if I can exercise any sovereign choice over what 'kind' of world I can live in I would sooner be someplace laden with meaning, everything responding to everything else like neurons fired in a great synchronous rhizome, moving in patterns which can be called neither ordered nor chaotic, than one whose lockstep indifference must be treated with false 'distance' (as if you can distance yourself from it). The universe does not change whether you perceive it with wonder or with the practicality of a mature, armoured adult. Identities can be fluid or can be fixed based on how you speak about them; the former gives us a lot more room to 'play'. Besides, when I look at almost everything and nearly everyone that I'm into, I can tell that I'm in good company - and when whatever conflagration, spoken of as inevitable by both 'sides', explodes across the fabric of our life I'd rather be down with those who have a game plan. That's what I say but not necessarily what I believe, mind you.

TIME IS ON MY SIDE

Anyway, let's pretend "topheavy" is another of those cryptosemantic primes laden with cabalistic significance, and let the previous five paragraphs can serve as an introduction for the following three.

Lately I hear, with more and more frequency, people discussing how they can receive things simply by 'asking the universe' for them. The principle is nothing new, the tenacity of the phrase to describe this basic principle is the only thing that really seems to stand out to me, if only because I feel the wording is a little peculiar (the universe?). Reasoning behind the notion suggests, not necessarily unreasonably, that since lines of correspondence and synchronicity between realities within and without are so robust, all you have to do is make a modest request for something and sooner or later it will turn up, freely available, in your vicinity. No formalities like wanking over (or just staring really hard at) a sigil necessary; honed and potent desire, they say, is enough to manifest the physically possible (and, likely in some cases, the physically im-). Try telling this to someone in times of famine, I know, but it's my reality and I can choose to, as they say, input the cheat codes.

Perhaps I am just a materialist creature who is host to so many concurrent desires that the law of averages suggests that sooner or later I will run into something that strikes one of my engorged fancies lying around on the street. Indeed, this has happened repeatedly, results often head-scratching; a workout bench appeared during one of the perennial "people's army" phases - an enormous and comfortable bed appeared on the day when circumstances made it clear that I could no longer sleep on a foam pad in the closet - I biked past a bundle of dried bamboo stalks resting on a eggshell green transformer box in Calgary, of all places,

Hence my surprise yesterday when, while walking through the air conditioner district (strangely, stores retailing similar products come in clusters around here, giving rise to such auspicious areas as the "air conditioner district", the "large-scale photocopying district", the "industrial fan" district, et cetera), I happened upon one of the more surreal and unlikely objects which I have had a persistent and acute desire for. Slumped in an alleyway, reflecting headlights multidirectionally like a glittery elephant crumpled under a hunter's gun, I found an enormous knotted mass of steel wool

Now what do you think I was seeking that for?

9:06pm:

TALKING CHINESE INTERNET EARTHQUAKE BLUES

2006 was a schizotypal shitstorm. What happened this year? It revealed itself in peeled back accordion folds of a game of 'exquisite corpse. "2006" is screamed in street Sanskrit by a bleary-eyed man with shit in his teeth. It had something to do with cultivating power through violating taboo, a reversal of processes within bringing about magickal reversals in processes without. We figured that out in 2006, but interior alchemy never really came that far; phosphatidyl choline, niacin, all those fellows are really a phenom of the year before. And what good clean magick was performed on our side's behalf in 2006, excepting a few onanistic rites with a candle and a winsome spidery design bic'd onto a piece of paper, just to make sure that we've still "got it"?

2006 was a pit stop on the highway to the deliverance or eschaton scenario of your choice. Not much to see here; at a stand a few miles back, someone is selling agate rock. The flipside of the toilet seat has a picture of a besneakered jogging Pacman. A wavering hand has chiseled 'smoke dope' into a sign bearing some tidbits about local history. In the gravel lot, someone is drying a towel on the hood of their Bronco. Do you want to stop for a while or should we just keep going? Anyone need to stretch their legs?

I don't have any access to the 'news' right now; I am in a country which other countries like to claim suppresses that kind of data, on the tail end of what theoretically was a significant earthquake (the office reaction to the news that two people had died was, verbatim, 'were they famous?') that has crippled my conceivable ability to get at it if I wanted to. Maybe this makes my reaction to the year 'purer' instead of (or as well as) more misinformed. I spent most of 2006 without a computer anyway. Was 2006 just a year devoted to tightening the screws? Did it feel that way to anyone else?

I spent a lot of the year outside. I lived in an unprecedented and possibly unnecessary variety of places and pulled off homelessness with the typical malevolent flash exercised by a self-conscious practitioner of the discipline. The summer drove everyone crazy, I fled to China. Hello, China. The tired old internal battle between the mammal forces suggesting that it is vital to wander around adventuring and the primate forces suggesting it is vital to be part of a tribe is the teen angst of the freshly minted adult. In 2006 the former constantly won out, but I've been missing being among the kind of friends who have more in common with than temporal-spatial location. It has been a lonely year, lonely enough to leave me with some serious doubts and fears about 'adulthood'. Not that those didn't exist before, just that in 2005 'meditate on the cold veracities of solitude' was still lingering somewhere on the to-do list.

I was hanging out with some friends in a dog park (there are such things!) in Calgary and discussing the behaviour of their retriever; it persistently returned thrown sticks, and minced around in exaggerated anxiety until they were hurled off somewhere again. The dog is not interested in the stick, it is interested in pleasing humans. It has been bred for the unique purpose of returning objects of a certain size and density to humans; after a few millennia of genetic engineering the drive to do so is tattooed into its mind as an absolutely crucial element of functional life. Returning a tossed stick is inescapable inbred pathology.

What does this say about retriever dogs born in the wild? With no human around to please, no socialized notion of how to please one if it could, and thousands of years of RNA heritage and cellular memory bearing down on it carrying this mandate. The dog exists in a state of undiluted animal angst, forever sensing that its life is rent by a yawning void, lacking the capacity to work out through reason or faith just what it is that's missing, mired in 'existential crisis' which has curled its way through its canine body and fused indistinguishable with its mind. This problem cannot be talked out; it must be exacted on the world in a series of barks and sniffs, brooded over with a vocabulary of snarls and yelps, a tale of incalculable misery transcending the "kafkaesque" narratives of any human depresso beat out in binary wags and ourobourous circles traced head-after-tail not out of joy but metaphor. 2006 was quite possibly the year of -that- dog.

4:42pm:

BETHUNE CAN'T EAT JUST ONE

A rust-green hinged metal first aid kit, a Maoist relic which can certainly cause and purports to cure tetanus, is being passed around the bar. I don't know who brought this prop to this ubiquitous "film posters"-themed pub, neither do I know what is inside it. Nevertheless the object bears a certain gravity and I cannot help but follow its movements through the corner of my eye, like a barroom letch relentlessly tracking his quarry.

I'm seated at the bar; someone has produced a plate of crabs ("they're river crabs, all female") from some imperceptible place, and beckoned me over by making a 'come-hither' motion with a hand clenching a grapefruit-sized crustacean. Together we set upon the plate of crabs, him extolling their health benefits all the while - "more protein than a chicken's egg!". Just as our conversation gets interesting, a man is flung from the other side of the room to land upon the two of us and our meal; he picks himself up, dusts the bits of exoskeleton and eyestalk from his Alabama State sweater, and without missing a beat slurs out:
"Bloody canadjen... betch yuo think ice hockey'sza sport... butchu doanno cricket!"

"I can name Bradman..."; my pescavorous companion perceives the joke and laughs, but no sign of response out of the intoxicated. Only later I will wonder how he so readily knew (dare I say, guessed?) my nationality. His tongue slowed by drink, the subtleties of his accent steamrolled over by articulations woefully approximate, I can make no similar observations about him.

"Thish box" he hoists the metal box precariously above his head - now where did that come from? - "thish box contains all the rules of cricket!"

Upon that proclamation he casts the box down, doubtless picturing himself as a Moses shattering that dull old control-freak stone tablet. Yet on its way to the barroom floor it is intercepted and cradled in a nearby lap.

"I love folk music!" loud and decisive, and then the beating out of a tattoo suited for a tabla on the box. Two voices join in, Nepalese, pronouncing the stately counterrhythms and slinky chromatics of a Kathmandu classic. A few bars later and I know my cue to jump in; in lucent harmony, emphasizing a complementary waltz meter, the Duane Pasco classic:

"Naika nanich tlus kluchmin kopa oihat... heyyyaoooheyyaoheyyaheyyya!"

Barroom singalong improv favours music which terminates at its highest point, no fussy business about drawing the piece to its "natural" conclusion - when it becomes evident WHAT the song could be, there is no reason to play it anymore. But I must have been singing this for a while... where has that cricketer gone? Has he left?

My mistake - I was scouring for him at eye level, when in fact he's lying on the floor - one man atop him in what seems to be a lusty embrace, another quite literally kicking him in the head with as much grace as one can muster while ramming a boot into someone else's temple.

"Canadiansh can't fight!" he screams from the floor, though the man kicking him is by all appearances not Canadian. Is he trying to goad me into joining in on his curb-stomping or is 'Canadian' simply his second-person appellation of choice? Yet he seems to be making wincing eye contact with me so I join in the discussion, both of us conveniently ignoring the silent third-party who is kicking one of the interlocuters in the head.

"No, we just don't fight"... then, a spark of machismo bridging the small gap between sanity and madness... "but when we do, we win!"

"Whahht are you? The"... THUD, leather on flesh... "the Buddha or shomehting?"

"Yes, I am!" loudly, to the attendant bar "Of course I am the Buddha!"

One of the Nepalese musicians will have none of that. "Well, if you're the Buddha why don't you recite the [and here some sutra is named]".

"I don't need to! Buddha over here! I don't need to!"

And upon glancing around, awaiting for a response, I see that this one musician and I are literally the only ones left in the barroom. The fight has spilled out onto the street. Cigarettes are foraged from the many half-packs left lying around, we split the egg-laden torso of the remaining river crab. But soon he notices something is amiss:
"Who took my coat?!"


TWELVE TWENTY, TWENTY TWELVE,,, TWENTY TWELVE, TWELVE TWENTY

I share the anecdote because it is quite likely this was a completely novel event. Isn't that what I came to China to find? Am I not a member of a generation tempered by the great and tyrannical prospect of the acceleration of knowledge, does novelty "theory" refracted through the dull prism of the simplest stoner lingo not define my present zeitgeist? I can still mention the passing generational fancies of Erowid, Bohemian Grove, Codex Alimentarius, blah blah blah here... twenty twelve is just another couple (dozen) global conflagrations away.

After the club, my shibboleth-slinging friend: "But what do you say to those women? They are normal people... they are our age... but because they were born in Siberia, they're working as prostitutes holding out for the first Shenyang industrialist who wanders into the (inauspiciously (or perhaps straight up sinister) named) bi fangzi and names the right figure".

Can you say to them:
Yeah, but did you dig the figures outside the pharmacy? Two animatronic Santa Claus mannequins in hand-me-down communist garb, dancing with SAXOPHONES while the ubiquitous technocheese plays from the streetside speakers? Red sashes strung across them extolling the virtues of the good chairman AND the product within? But believe me, I checked inside -- maybe my interest in the sike uhh dell ick laps my ability to express myself in (medical) Chinese, but they wouldn't sell me B vitamins in anything except their 'compound' form... and that Niacin is no-flush, man...

Or can you tell them:
Yeah, but outside my apartment on Christmas Eve (a holiday for 'couples', the locals say) the guy who sleeps in the little hut and presses the button which allows cars to enter and exit was somehow, as a promotional gimmick for the building, given a microphone hooked up to two outward-pointing speakers and asked to spend the night singing? As he progressively became drunk on baijiu through the night his voice continued to strain ever more boisterously through the square wave distortion of the system, words sung-shouted from his supine position on the sofa, degenerating into inevitable screaming and giggling...

No, you tell me!

Happy holidays and greetings from the inevitable future. I haven't written for a while because a nearby earthquake has crippled the Chinese internet; I have only been able to access this website right now because I picked a very unpopular time to give the 'Go' button a try.

New Years'; I'll skip the inevitable chaotics of the festivities, right to the point where I'm somehow finding myself up with the DJ at the aggressively international 'hip hop club', toasting - one unfortunate pair of freestyled couplets:

Like Hu Jintao, Like Chairman Mao
There's reams of shit we won't allow
So the earthquake in Taiwan took it away
Before you ever knew what it was anyway

Yeah, 'way' and 'way'.

9:33pm:

NIETZSCHE WON'T EATJA

'Location' has always been a main theme running throughout the life of that capricious shade, my subconscious self - my manifestation in some pancultural realm so massive and slippery that entire cultures have run themselves aground trying to figure out just what the hell it is and what the hell goes on there. I usually omit the oneiromancy here, saving it for a more suitable place but the unavoidable yet wholesome obsession with "place" kind of creates a funny situation for me when I wake up. After hopping about from one familiar stomping ground to another, "Ontario", "Vancouver", "San Francisco", "Calgary", I am awakened by my alarm - during the brief flash of transition I must establish, with mind awash in post-somnolent delirium, just which of these places I'm actually in... my bedroom, sparse and becurtained, materializes before my eyes... my mind performs its daily miracle, putting itself together again in more or less the same way after sleep's full ego dissolution... and: "oh, right....."

What does it mean that the middle kingdom hasn't entered my dreaming life yet? My subconscious was caught by a massive metaphysical butterfly net whose borders roughly align to the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines of good old turtle island! You are meant to be here, you're making a mistake! Fling your body where you will but your soul is quarantined - the hoops one must jump through to attain a cabalistic visa make all those indistinguishable forms and lineups at the embassy seem as easy as, oh, teaching an "English class". You were never a part of this culture! You are alien to the ground - your corporeal form is too heavy but it spits your soul out!

The bloodstained trump card: but, well, it's not like I'm "from" North America...

Why here? It often seems like there is a very fine line between the inevitable and the totally random. Why am I in a hyperurban megapolis if but months ago I was a bearded and insect-eaten youth screaming at bears in the country, and but months before that I was sitting around in smalltown cafes reading Jacques Ellul (check him out, if his books are good enough for the unabomber...) and filling myself with one compelling argument after another from dozens of different points of attack about why "the city" is even unsavoury in abstracto, not to mention the horror of its many unthinkable realizations - why am I here when I could only really settle into my last urban experience after passing through the trial-by-fire panicky freakout embarassing for all involved?

Or maybe that -is- why. We can consider The Void not as an all-engulfing panomnivorous black hole but as a very dense pivot point... it draws us into its orbit, our velocity increases with every circumgyration until we are finally flung out at full force in some direction mandated by fate andslashor astrophysics. A taste of the capital-N nothing in its Canadian manifestation, and I am sent off to splatter against China's windshield like a juicy bluebottle fly. Though it knows no national boundaries? Well, duh...

QUELLING QUOTIDIAN QUALMS

Returning to the terrestrial: though I like to pretend that I can "play" the piano, the only two instruments that I've ever been anywhere near good at have been the bass and the banjo. Therefore I have high hopes for the new object I have acquired to keep me company in my otherwise empty apartment, a zhongyuan, as far as I can tell some unholy Han-dynasty combination of the two (and predating them both, as the party line goes). But a series of strings, running along a fretted neck and across a resonant body - isn't it just splitting hairs for a musician to make distinctions between any instruments which employ that principle? Save the specifics for the techies and the manufacturers - I've now got something I can fret and pluck.

12:27am:

WE ARE CHRISTMAS

Yuletide polyrhythms bounce doppler across zhongjie: on my right, a trancey 'Jingle Bells', vocalist a solo female, blasts from the streetside speakers of a jewelry shop - on my left, a conspicuously "chipmunks" childrens' choir vocalizes over a bassed-out happy hardcore 'Frosty the Snowman', enticing me towards... another jewelry store.

On arriving at work I am given my red felt hat with white trim and pom-pom; most of the other teachers have refused to don them now their gay apparel, but hell, it will be something to talk about in class. 'Filling time' is essentially my task here; I arrive in an office, a few minutes pre-lesson am given my assigned teaching task by the Chinese teacher usually responsible for whatever gaggle of kids I have been scheduled to work with - employed as I am only for my golden voice, this task usually involves teaching the pronunciation of five or six words (sometimes they are not real words... sometimes they are proper names...) consistently bound by hypothetical rhyme schemes and/or assonance. Twenty-five minutes for "splish", "splash" and "splosh"... explain the meaning, make sure they can say it, maybe work in some kind of game so the kids stay excited.

Proceed thus as Santa Claus and, when the time is right, leave. As far as I can tell there is one ubiquitous Santa Claus cutout decorating the doorways of businesses here, its universality hinting perhaps at the 'communist aesthetic' which is, of course, conspicuously absent otherwise. The same Santa face wherever you go: a little red cross splashed across the building's facing, protecting the firstborn of the huddled jewry within from certain massacre at the hands of some boorish menace from the west. But then: suddenly an idol diverging from the trend, a Saint Nick whose rosy cheeks have been extended into a face in full crimson fleshtone, some daoist demon resurfaced and disguised as the patron saint of children.

My last Christmas I spent in Vancouver, mostly wandering around in the rain: cues that the yuletide season was at hand came in the form of muted amber "icicle" lights on awnings and the deliberately secular sounds of "Sleigh Ride" being played intermittently by designated mall speaker systems. I used to enjoy the Christmas season in Canada, it allowed me the opportunity to daydream that I lived in a land that was always decorated this way - towering tannenbaums and jubilant cherubs an actual icon of the culture that I was living in, a place that made the deliberate choice to manifest itself visually in forms more 'folky' than architecture polished and buffed into formlessness, a Starbucks mural of a nearly abstracted jazzman wailing on a saxophone in burgundy and ochre, a corporate courtyard arrayed around the academically deliberate curves of a silver "expressionist" obelisk. And there were those cow statues... and those orcas....

Back in Shenyang, a Santa mannequin stands vigil over a dress shop. A standard 'fashion' model, its feminine topography is just barely concealed by a baggy red suit and cotton swab beard. Elsewhere, two mannequin arms reach out, with spooky verisimilitude, from a trash bin.

The red velvets, the flickering lights, the glitter of silver tinsel are all present in quantities that would be unheard of in Canada... but they do not really stand out. Here they are simply enveloped, if only by the rumour that the 'real China' shows her plumage in crimsons and metallics. Reality is swallowed by the delusion promoted by swank restaurants and palatial reception halls... Christmas in China, the presence of the Roman alphabet and the coca cola saint is all that stands out against a field whirling, blinking, forever red... figure and ground conflate into a colourblindness test, tacky on tacky; it's always Christmas and it never matters, the portal gapes open and we enter when we feel like it, always in single file.

2:26am:

SCAVENGING FREE RADICAL TECH

So there's a Canadian, an Australian, and an Irishman sitting in a bar, and as the pittance-paid brews continue to stack up, who has the flowing cup not rendered locquacious? The talk turns from the quotidian as they begin to tell pub jokes, beginning with the premise "So there's a Canadian, an Australian, and an Irishman sitting in a bar, and after a few brews their tongues begin to loosen and the topics turn from the minutae of their days to bawdy jokes, the first one going: "So there's a Canadian, an Australian and an Irishman sitting in a bar, and a few drinks in the pretenses of polite and metered discussion are dropped and they decide they would sooner be regaling one another with a little ethnic humour, so someone begins: "So there's a Canadian, an Australian and an Irishman sitting in a bar, and a couple mugs in they have firmly turned their backs on the discussion of earthly affairs and would sooner find humour in the hypothetical - thusly one begins: "So there's a Canadian, an Australian and an Irishman sitting in a bar, and upon their quaffing a few pints it becomes clear that the vibe of the evening is heavily slanted towards that timeworn tradition of recounting the old crowd-pleasers, so the first to carry the torch across that inevitably-transcended gulf between pleasantry into ribaldry, that boundary which is guarded but by flimsy ceremony and avoidable exhaustion, begins: "So there's a Canadian......... " " " " " " ".

Yes, it turns out that just standing around bearing the mark of Cain is enough to fall into the tiny and familial 'expat' community - composed, as far as I can tell, of that dozen or so folk who work for the same company as I and haven't yet been suckered into the exclusivity of marital bliss - who are a kind and reasonable bunch of people, getting along for the sake of getting along, a pure form of socialization uncoloured by some distinctive sense of group unity or tribalism; viz, where other groups I have hung with have fallen along lines described clear Venn diagrams, circles labelled with familiar old tropes riffing on motifs social and aesthetic, my 'social time' in the last day or so has been spent on a polka-dot plain, superceded by the thin new-moon sliver of 'in manchuria' and 'anglo'... though both of those terms, and particularly the latter, can be semantic swiss cheese if you look at it the right way - but that kind of ponderous metaling-what-stics, it turns out, is my unique and irrelevant domain amongst the liaoning laowai. The semantician (I am to begin wrestling in the WWF under that name) identifies a niche through creating it, while simultaneously creating a niche through identifying it - and fills it, because all you have to do is 'believe' you do. Click your spittle-soaked rubber heels together and say "there's no place like LOC[beIN[PLACE(home)]]".

CLAN OF THE CAVE BORE

A few days ago I dug an excavated neolithic village, the millenia-old tombs of an old mongol steppe tribe who made its matriarchal way to manchuria, buried its empress, scattered a bunch of pottery around and was swallowed by whatever purges happened to be going on in 2000 BC. A fantastic place to be on a frost-tipped winter's day, thatched huts recreated over fenced-off archaeological dig sites; a guide following from one ex-house to another and attempting to explain its function. lourdzwaa, in hanyu: "So... when someone dies.... they put them in here? under the earth?" "Yes...." - a single finger extended and dragged across his neck for illustration. lourdzwaa: "so... before someone is put in there... no head?". Guide: "No.... they have heads".

Yes, turn a few radians in any direction and you will see the highrises and factory chimneys. Ten thousand photographs taken illustrating the "new" China, something modern framed through the ruins of something ancient... ooh, ooh, get a shot of that apartment block cresting behind the manchu gates, bonus points if a few rays of sun emanate from their points of intersection... "land of contrast" being a code word employed as far as I can tell only by outsiders for emotions ranging from the morose sigh of "one more civilization swallowed up" to the white-knuckle eschatological "wait, so they'll all want cars now too?".

11:27pm:

LINGUA: FRANK, UHH..

1. Word to the new enlightenment: reliable sources have informed me via the e-mail that there is now a minor league soccer team in the spartan prairie city-state of Calgary that have made The Core a part of their training ritual. One love, jah provideth, eee tee cee...

2. Add to my list of hanyu conversations the one wherein I ask around about why a certain double-A battery was much more expensive than another certain double-A battery (the answer is apparently because "it's better"), and a dozen or so exegeses on the how and wherefor of Canada's being a colder place than China ("I lived in the north! In the woods! In a tent! It was much colder! Snow! This is nothing!" speak-shouted telegraphically, my neck snapping in exaggerated grotesqueries of the fourth tone); yes, up in Manchuria we're also talking about the weather.
A flock of geese propels itself across the globe in annual migration and picks up nothing but idle chatter: "gehen sie um die ecke....man, there was this girl..... quelle age as-tu?... wo ke-bu-keyi gei ni da dianhua...." - linguists the world over throw down their mortarboards in frustrated humiliation, their accumulated degrees and commendations withdrawn due to public indifference; "Were you just fooling us with that 'science' stuff all along?".

Right, linguistics:
Even the most obstinate, xenophobic monolingual cannot help but pick up certain tiny fluorishes of the language spoken in the place where they have ended up residing; of all of these tiny bilingual grace notes, the use of contextually appropriate proper nouns is the simplest barrier to break. I live on 'zhong jie' (look the place up on ewetube), it is easy to think of it as 'zhong jie' because that is what it is named - hence the awkwardness when someone addressing me in English chooses to overcorrect their speech to such a degree that they replace that perfectly sensible street name with the pathetic one-two punch of 'middle street'. Wouldn't this kind of code-switching just further confuse someone whose zhongguohua is so sorrowfully inadequate that they need that kind of help (such as taciturn old lourdzwaa is sometimes assumed to be)? If you are convinced you can't remember a few simple syllable-clusters corresponding to a few simple phrases, you may very well run into some cognitive roadblock when it comes to referring to a place by -two- names; western nomenclature's preference of "centre" is just that much more static on the screen...

DEUS EX LINGUA

...but what is that 'anecdote' meant to address? I am in a strange position viz. speech, subject to that arcane foolishness of one who has a decent syntactic and theoretical grasp on a language but can barely use it to communicate. Chinese language classes, Chinese linguistics classes, a linguistics degree; these three factors conspire to leave me with a fairly reasonable notion of some abstract 'Chinese grammar', but the skeleton stands fleshless in my brain like a middle-school science class prop; I know how thngs work, but I can't spar word-to-word for shit. I stare dumbly at my conversant until I can form some notion of what they want out of me, pause to process for a moment, and fire back a series of stuffy conditionals and relative clauses nestled together as factory-misprint babushka dolls... the grammar so immaculate and dated that it is at worst inscrutable, at best "polite"...

But with a flash, enter our old friend the pomo linguist. He appears in a cloud of blacklight and steam, clad head-to-toe in black leather, wrap-around sunglasses hiding bloodshot eyes, hair greased back to reveal a forehead tattooed with the word "logos" in Hellenic script. Throwing back his trenchcoat he uncovers four arms; two hold perpetually burning copies of Chomsky and Samuel Johnson, the third holds a wand, the fourth a conch shell. On opening his mouth he reveals two tongues; moving independent of one another, they begin to proclaim simultaneously in English and Phrygian:

"But you don't need to learn any words! Every generation, in every inevitable Oedipal kill-the-father-fuck-the-mother pageant, seeks to completely wipe clean the lexicon they have inherited and replace it with the novel and the recontextualized. A group's success and dominance is measured by the degree to which it can spontaneously raze their inherited vocabulary to the ground and grow fecund neologisms from its ashes. The language is a scratching post scarred by linguistic alphas of the past, wounds inflicted by today's tough and precocious running their ragged perpendiculars. Yet this territory is marked mostly through the recasting of vocabulary items, the old syntax retained (because syntax is, like, hard) except where the newly recast words necessitate change. So worry not... you know no less than today's frazzled parents in their struggle to understand their children, you are in a position to ride the crest of any linguistic innovators you so choose, or pick up the torch and become one yourself! So whenever you find yourself lost, just repeat silently to yourself this prayer: 'language has no words... language has no words...' and all will be well in good time. But ere I depart consider this: if there are no words, how can there be word class?"

And with that he's gone, fading back into omniglottal void - the smoke clears revealing lourdzwaa sitting in the back room of a Manchurian wangba off what is most resolutely and clearly zhongjie. Why? Because, for now, that's what people seem to agree to call it...

12:59am:

TEN MILLION VOICES SHOUTING 'GAVAGAI'

Dinnertime, a loose conference of representatives from various tributaries and pools of the great English waterway gathers to chat and shout for more tea. Two each of Brits and Australians, an Irishman, a Kenyan and yours truly reluctantly flying the Canadian flag... that I'm the kind of unrepentant ingrate that engages in all manner of transgressive and unwholesome behaviour like "not standing for the anthem" is, of course, a harmless tic belying this most convenient of identities. The sun, one fears, never sets on anything.

And once more it's decoding - early bursts of good-to-meet-you sarcasm and innuendo melt into more lively discourse on more variable topics. It is good to be talking to nice people, to dust the cobwebs off of the old conversational faculties in the presence of the kind and receptive - at my most energetic I am allowed the opportunity for a monologue riffing on the great fire of London, and I am met with a chorus of 'london bridge is falling down' as a jovial rebuff. Five bottles of pijiu in we're slinging politics back and forth and it is clear that with a little prestidigitation one can manipulate the flow to get everyone nodding in assent at the vague tautologies of libertarianism, meaningful because the philosophy, minus the mysticism that necessarily follows, is at its heart so stark and simple. A few well-placed "why"s, the assertion that convience is not enough, the realization that A does not follow B except in the paperwork... we know, we know.

Everyone is of the opinion that the increasing military presence in their countries makes them uneasy, for reasons ranging from my sometimes embarassing affectation of doom-and-gloom apocalypticism to purer instinct. Everyone moved to China because the threat, as they perceive it, is a little less pronounced here... or perhaps just a little more subtle, maybe, if you can barely speak the language.

Everyone has seen the monstrous human void gaping desperate under their home nations' rugs. We've all graced the crackhouses and witnessed at the very least some miserable hint of what goes on there, been accosted by junkies in droves, been ripped off to pay for somebody's fix, found compassion in contempt and vice-versa. There is an appeal to change, or an appeal to the 'system'; solutions proposed are draconian and relentless, or equally ruthless in their commiseration. What the hell do we do? How do we answer the insolubilia that have confounded people much wiser, kinder, more generous than us? "Change" is forever vast and forever inevitable... have we gratuitously changed our lifestyles just to remind ourselves that it exists, that it's this random flow that we live for and through?

One of the most accidentally prescient films ever made is "They Live", a nineteen-eighties action thriller starring the inestimable Rowdy Roddy Piper. I know very little of the plot, I only caught it in fragments from underneath a blanket on the homey hardwood of a bike-punk flop in Seattle where I was, in the parlance of the times, crashing. As far as I could surmise, squinting as I was through flat dialogue and macho sensibilities, the movie is about a guy who somehow gets his hands on this pair of sunglasses that strip away confusion and affectation from the world; looking through them, billboards all display an authoritarian 'CONSUME' in fuzzy gray Arial, fast food read "POISON", various businessmen, cops, and profiteers of misery are seen with grinning death masks replacing their human faces... and at this point Rowdy Roddy heads off on a mission using these glasses to determine who he should and shouldn't kill - heads roll, blood is spilled, wrestling holds subdue zombified stormtroopers, eee tee cee. I, like everyone else who saw the film, am only really clear when it comes to the premise.

You know what follows. When everything I see blazing before me is besmeared with oft-indecipherable hanzi, when all I can do before my zhongguohua is up to snuff is use a few cues and make an "educated" guess, do I not find myself in a comparable position? A car ad just reads 'CAR AD', whatever subconscious appeals to sex and class and power exist in the visuals are palpable but without the language the advertiser cannot sustain a direct hit. The cops are the guys in the uniforms. Someone is trying to sell me something; maybe I want it and maybe I don't. FOOD STORE. SODA.

But come on now, lourdzwaa, this is elementary stuff...

... but come on now, lourdzwaa is an elementary school teacher.

11:07pm:

KIDDING AROUND

In Canada I never really had any occasion to spend time with children. Aside from the friends who deigned to let me check in on their brood every now and then - the questing twins, prescient tykes who recognize me through subtle cues, toddlers lost among the quiet jaw-clenching and tooth-gritting in latent ideological tugs-of-war - "this is just like television!", one exclaims to me as we hike through a rainforest on custody day, his father quietly hangs his head for fear that his battle is an uphill one - coddled infants, bemohawked postnatal protopunks with fruit-scented felt marker tattoos, our interactions a wordless confusion as I am busy addressing their parents - aside from all of those, this is really my first time dealing with this subset of society since numbering myself amongst them. Listen to me read, repeat what I say. My enthusiasm depends chiefly on theirs - cues slowly spring up allowing me to differentiate between the just-recently ex-infants who will giggle with joy whenever I address them, the youngsters who will only be mollified if I spend classtime arbitrarily assigning points and liberally dispensing company-issue stickers, and the morose preadolescents craving only anonymity, silently casting their bepimpled faces deskwards upon any request for participation. Listen and repeat. What's happening in this picture? Who can read the first sentence for me?

Some ice is broken in one class when I forget the rules of propriety and wear a t-shirt to the classroom, accidentally revealing the fanciful and deliberate inky scars running up my arms. Though I did not deliberately choose them for that purpose (though the mysteries of the subconscious often hinge on how stubbornly deliberate its manifestations), my tattoos often end up serving as a litmus test for adults. The freak flag flies high, banners scream with crystal-clear enunciation "shibboleth, shibboleth!". Whether one grimaces in disgust or leans forward in fascination (or nods in indifference, probably the most reasonable response) can allow me, from atop my most sociopathic perch, to make certain split-second decisions regarding just where their aesthetic allegiances lie. On a westbound greyhound bus from Kenora, a European man the seat over asked for a closer look at the one decorating my right shoulder, laughed, pointed with his two index fingers in an 'X', and shouted, in fine and concise summation, "evil, evil, evil!". Yet these figures are neither cigar-chomping and goateed, nor coy and voluptuous (certainly not!) - the forms are simple and monochrome, black lines and gray shading, hinting at certain prechristian motifs which I, yet uninitiated into any graded fraternal order, cannot pretend to understand. But there they are, and there my arms are, and onwards we go...

"Arm! Arm!" shout my students. The activity is steered towards a guessing-game, twenty questions, in which they try to determine what is imprinted on my (now concealed) forearm. A list of false starts accumulates as a miniature zoological garden pooling on the blackboard until one keen lad finally guesses right - "horse!". "Yes, a horse, you're right!" I say, briefly flashing the moneyshot across the room - and indeed, that is all they need register it as, connotation-free. Then, on to the monotonous (for me, maybe) drill of repeating all of the words that we have listed.

And so, there you have English teaching. Wigging out in front of a roomful of generally distracted, occasionally rapt children for a scant sixteen hours a week - ostensibly, this is why I am allowed to be here. As jobs go, it seems okay. I can grin and speak in a clear broadcaster voice as easily as the next overqualified weirdo. Listless Canadian youth get paid to hang out and pretend to talk, the Queen's English digs its tentacles further into far-flung reaches of the globe, the sun never sets on the English language - if only on its most brutal, utilitarian, commercial face.

GOD SAVE THE _______

Hypocrite that I am, I am concerned with the increasing homogenization of the world while participating on the front lines. I just wanted to "see something new", you know, and it's not like Canada is any more my so-called ancestral home than Manchuria is. Heritage lost after conquest upon bloody conquest, homo peregrinus, what recourse is there? "Just be quiet. Listen to what people say. Be quiet. Make friends. Share food. Share drinks. Listen to one another. Shut up. Share things. Invite people to your home. Listen..."

English is a strange one - originating from a craggy island in the northwest corner of Europe, bearing manifold etymological scars from its sundry conquerors, some kind of right place/right time scenario allows it to infect the world with its low velars, its spittle-spraying interdentals, its indecorous disregard for aspiration, the loose relatvity of its vowel chart, the wanton free variation of its consonants. And that lexicon! An unapologetic word nerd, I am pleased to have the greatest facility with the language that purports to have the largest vocabulary, although most of it is simply assimilated over from the speech of whoever it happens to run into. The pomo linguist might suggest that this devil-may-care attitude to what words enter the language, unattended by any of the officious and bureaucratic language academies declaring what is 'correct' that saddled its other European confreres, may have been some factor leading to England's status as a great and vile imperial aggressor. "What was it you said you called these? Sz'gjt'rRuus? Okay, from now on we're placing a tax on all your sz'gjt'rRuus."

All the anarchist english teacher can hope is that these youth indocrinated will pervert the language to such a degree that it suits them -that they will graduate from english academy and begin to liberally warp the structures and vocabulary until some idiolect takes form meaningful to their lives and their desires, not those of some market force imagined into being by the world's accumulated fear of taking personal responsibility. The horrific pettiness of the "economy" be damned, the one thing the linguistics degree that somehow follows my name has most taught me is that there is great humanist joy to be found in exploring the unique ways we choose to modify that finite combination of glottal flappings and tongue contortions our anatomy allows us to try to share a little something about the world around us with our friends, enemies, lovers, foes - that the new and unique idiom that develops spontaneously and necessarily between every group of every conceivable size is a delightful thing to participate in - it is a collection unbounded and ungoverned that expands and contracts at the will of human factors, as fiercely apolitical as anything bound strictly to biology and not to those spiritually misleading forces of organization and order. Learning new words can be a wonderful and illuminating thing, may you all giggle over their idiosyncracies as you spar with them amorphously, and may none of you ever be so unfortunate as to find yourself trading them across the rectilinear tables of international business...

chako iht man iaka nim doktor frans boas, iaka mamuk cim kanawi lalang kopa ukuk ilihi....

10:28pm:

PARANOIA WILL DESTROY'YA

The assumption among certain expats - a few of whom I occasionally run into - is that a young man from 'Canada' (and as this narrative grows to a pithy but international scope, we can assume furthermore all nation names to be read thusly, scornfully, fixed between quotation marks belying the ill-gotten Proper Noun they hang their atrocities on like an infernal coatrack) who willfully gives up the comforts of a peer group, a (even if it's bad) reputation, a familiar map of alleys and backways both physical and otherwise one can slide through like a slinky Dickensian rogue - is doing so because of some latent Sinophilia. People assume things about one another all the time, I wouldn't have made it this far if my skin was so thin that this bothered me, but the baseline belief that I am some fellow sex tourist drawn over by wafting fumes of 'exotic' incense is a little, how do you say, appalling?

What does it take to understand a culture? Probably a lot more than it does to participate in one, and to do that you probably have to be there. Born into that great post-fake-capitalist wasteland that you're all-too-familiar with if you're reading this on a computer, ancestrally linked to a chain of murderers and thieves, community fractured along the imaginary orthogonals of the commerce illusion, you know the score... the youth links up with any of the ad hoc parasite clans and hope that with their combined strength they can squeeze a few drops of meaning out of scabbed-over North America's saggy washcloth. We know that. So why move to China? I didn't need to arrive to know that the things they told me about life here couldn't possibly be true. Any blisters of beauty or sense, if they are to be found here, need to be worked for. A washed-out flower-mountain painting looks like a Kinkade to me. Whether they choose to bother little old me or not, there are still cops. Governments want to control language. Don't walk on that side of the street. Visit the mall. We charge admission. Lunch at McDonald's. Update your cell phone plan. Buy some ringtones. Smoke. Sounds familiar?

But there is a street-level presence here, even an alley-level presence here; no matter what kind of crazy fascist you are or want to be, you can't squeeze ten million people into a confined area and not find that elusive golden pus 'humanity' flowing from the wounds in the Earth - it almost makes it all worthwhile. I eat baked potatos and mime the actions of chatting with a woman in my alley. I share laughter with strangers. Over a bowl of organ meats in brine, I have my first legit zhongwen conversation, sharing some facts about the demographics and, dare I say, sociolinguistics of Canada with a very patient chef who joins me at my table. Being alone seems easy. Funny how most of these circumstances involve food...

BUT THE INSOLUBILIA WON'T KILL'YA

Some expat hones in on yours truly to regale me with monologues riffing on his various sexcapades. Apparently he (and he means, by extension, me, sharing as we do the mark of Cain) is theoretically assumed by a theoretically repressed subset of the population to possess traits desirable to the, how do you say, young woman of superficiality. I hold my tongue - what could I even say? He points out various girls who he finds appealing and enumerates the reasons why. I hear tales revolving around certain states of deshabille alluded to by certain dresses he has seen modeled on the streets of Beijing. Yet in a world so oversaturated with images of female sexuality (or, much more accurately, images of what patriarchal values assume female sexuality to be), isn't this just like mentioning the passing clouds? Without any access to the menaces of identity, the daily parade of the young and virile is just weather. But - as I have been informed by a page in the textbook I 'teach' - "The English enjoy talking about weather at great lengths".

A young woman, walking arm-in-arm with an older woman I believe to be her mother, shouts 'hello!' from across the street and beckons me over. When I arrive, she asks if I have a girlfriend and if I will call her. I mumble something amounting to "maybe, but, uhh, I just got here and don't actually have a phone yet". "I don't think you're going to call me!" she pouts. "Maybe" is the most diplomatic response I can muster, and we go our separate ways. What was that all about? The big chameleon eyes, dunne shock of antigravity hair and perennial hints of avoirdupois that left me a lad with a "good personality" on old turtle island have here become beacons demanding streetside accosting. Yet my fetishes lie dormant and subterranean, seeking out human manifestations a lot more subtle and immaterial than, as the expat shares with me, "Asian".

"So did you call her?" the expat asks.
"Nah..." I drawl.

I used to get off on the 'male bonding' sessions that I occasionally found myself dropped into, if only because they were so incongruous with every other interaction I chose that I appreciated their brutal non-sequiteur tangentiality. If I nod, grunt, laugh, smile and quaff on the appropriate clumsy cues, I become a spy who has breached the imposing gates of masculinity. And half the time, I left the situation feeling like I've had some (admittedly atavistic) fun.

But lately it's been tiresome, and as the novelty wears off it becomes more and more apparent that the purpose of these exchanges is to determine whether I'm "straight" or not, and if they believe the answer to be an affirmative to reinforce and celebrate our mutual "straightness". The entire exercise reveals itself as an exercise in fear; facing the formidable and overwhelming psychedelia of sex, steeped in mystery and cloudy arcana, the cabalism of delicate animal fear and fascination can be bulldozed away by choosing to see sex everywhere and reporting it with routine, militarized timing to every ostensibly open ear. Indulgence keeps the oracular darkness at bay. The nervous and horny ex-pat, the sinophile, the shameless idolator, all choose this secular dread. Yet in China too, sex is a primitive mystery and the grand trine of the faculties when we 'get it', the total eclipse of the mind, happens in earnest for but moments, experienced maybe alone, probably in silence.

3:44am:

BOOKING IT TO BEIJING

Nuisances and rewards rear up cresting on the horizon; nothing has particularly bothered me or delighted me yet, save those requisite thrills and terrors of intercontinental travel on a whim, but it becomes quite clear what will.

That is to say: how is a bibliophile, embarassingly monolingual in terms of his reading matter, to cope in a city that doesn't seem to have any great swathes of English literature floating around? Thanks to the vagaries of hasty packing, I only brought four books with me; first, a copy of "Mason & Dixon" which I have been toting around in various states of abortion and false starts for the last four or five years, which I devoured in my first five or six days here. The capsule review: totally fucking fantastic, if you're the kind of person who is into that kind of dense sprawl which only pretends (or which the size may lead one to assume) to be of the "pomo metafiction" camp.

My other three selections were chiefly made based on their content-to-size ratio; that is, books which seemed to hit the highest word count in a pocket volume via flimsy pages and eye-straining font sizes. Thus, I've also got a copy of the collected works of Rabelais, a tattered (because I dragged it through the woods with me, not because I've read it yet) Don Quixote, and, on some perverse whim, The Decameron. This, as I see it, adds up to maybe a month and a half.

In the anglo world, swift reading was encouraged; the cities I haunted were teeming with libraries, bookshops and generous friends offering me an inexhaustible supply of fresh and exciting novelty, the only thing standing between me and my next fantastic conquest (and is it perhaps still chauvinist to use the rubbed-off residue of that metaphor to describe reading?) was whatever I was reading at the time. I darted through books, the perpetually dangling carrot of 'something else to read' enough for me to invest hours in the hobby.

So now I am faced with a dillemma: do I change my reading habits and reinvent myself as some literary voluptuary, learning to get it on protracted tantric-style with my four perpetual partners instead of hitting up every shelf at the library with that hurried old in-out? Do I cave in, get a credit card, and hope some online retailer will ship to my sketchy Liaoning province address? Do I make an impassioned plea to the great online wilderness, hoping that some hapless anglo in China is as down with the idea of a 'book exchange' as I am?

I checked out some bookstores while out on a wander yesterday; one of the town's largest seems to have some 19th century literature stocked in the 'learn english' section. A backup plan begins to form: I can theoretically stave off whatever braindeath occurs without books OR friends (neither of which I presently have, both of which often seem to me to be intro- and extroverted realizations of the same desire) by buying annotated condensations of "Gone with the Wind" or "Vanity Fair", largeprint with all the tough words emboldened (which is there highlighted not for verisimilitude, but to draw your attention to the one English circumfix... "fucking" being its parallel as the most popular English infix, as in 'fan-fucking-tastic'). But is this really my fate? Privatio praesupponit habitum, as they (who?) say.

Forgive the spoiled, soiled outburst. My 'favourite author', one who has never failed to completely delight every valence of every literary sensor I have ever grown, has just released a new book. Now in his seventies, first new book in a decade, big fat novel of thousands of pages brimming with great hype and promise, available to be hawked but days after I fled those narcokleptocratic vestiges of the world where it would be difficult NOT to come by, etc. etc., etc.

DEAD POETS' SOBRIETY

"Teaching"... who knew? Day one, I am placed in a classroom and given an hour to teach but two constructions "Hi, how are you?" and "Goodbye, see you later." Seventy minutes and several rousing renditions of the goodbye song later, I run the gauntlet of amused parents (they stand by the doorway, monitoring my deliberate histrionics) and exeunt to the bustling street, streetside loudspeakers of a nightclub blaring the tinny arpeggiations of a saccharine guoyu 'Hotel California'. My song, needless to say, was better.

2:04am:

WORSHYPPE THEE ANGSTROM

Evidently the quaint little trope encountered by travelers everywhere is that they discover, following enough immersion in a culture 'different' enough from their 'own' (that one clause being filled with enough loaded statements to damn me to some PC purgatory, but let us be charitable and suspend our disbelief, and then suspend our sum total of remaining belief, and then suspend the beliefless gulf that rests on the perfect zero -- I for the time being shall ask nothing less of my 'readers' than total nihilism) is that they were 'outsiders' all along. One apparently jumps across various hurdles communicatory, creative and quotidian until collapsing in an exhausted heap on the other end of the track, hyperventilating, a bloodrush to the head delivering the vertiginous profundity that 'I never could communicate with strangers anyway!'

But then, I didn't have to come all the way to the middle kingdom to uncover that little truism. A few mortal decades have rendered the stock response to any address aimed my way, idioma be damned, a benevolent and doe-eyed nodding gaze while my mind scrambles to determine just what this person wants of me and whether my capacity and desire to acquiesce happen to be in eclipse at that moment. And as for any response I will give back, my woefully idiosyncratic English generally leaves a lot more people scowling in incomprehension than that sturdy old mule, my brutally (indeed barbarically) insufficient zhongguohua.

A sincere answer to that ever-inappropriate, always-unavoidable English greeting "how are you?" is enough to establish a cognitive gulf... yet even the 'sincere' answer ('ambiguous as ever!') is a difficult one for me to produce sometimes. Knowing that the pressure is on, some selfish sector realizing that I ought to reply with something novel, creative, and charming, I pause for a little too long, stumble over a joke, and end up relaying, telegraphically, my thoughts on the greeting ritual in general, conveniently forgetting that metaconversation is not exactly relished by those who wish to "get on" with "their" "day". There is a strict 'how are you' quota I must daily fill, who do you think you are, interrupting my flow like that!

So, of course, the most 'alien' conversation I had occurred with two colleagues from the anglophonic empire, an American and an Australian, who extended the olive branch and invited me to dinner. Still in flirtation with the city, I was not prepared to engage in their blustery conversation about how "gross" all the spitting is - when it became my turn to speak, I diplomatically volunteered that it is quite likely that just as much saliva hits the street in my Canadian homeland, it is just that it is done surreptitiously, ipsut mamuk, unannounced by that booming ingressive-glottouvular-fricative surely familiar to anyone in this neck of the woods. Their response: silence, their own surreptitious exchange of rolled eyes unlikely an illustration of the slyness of which I spoke. Later on, when the unfortunate topic of 'teaching' came up, I explained how after enough observation I felt like I had a handle on it but there might be, and here's what I said in its embarassing verbatim, "some dark subtlety later revealed". They made no effort to disguise their roll of the eyes that time.

Contrast this with every Chinese conversation I have had thusfar: pointing, grunting, over-and-underenunciating "I want that one! How much does it cost! Thank you!". Or on one of my more verbose days "I also like basketball! Michael Jordan! Shaquille O'Neal!". Coincidentally, the two proper names I know in the language (and can render in hanzi too, for whatever embarassing reason). It didn't even matter that I don't know a damn thing about basketball... no elaboration was necessary.

So, moving from micro to macro, let's talk about 'outsiders'. Western culture, which for a while I was lucky enough to experience for a short while, before blossoming into a reasoning being, from the vantage point of a teen in the throes of that ubiquitous 'angst', seems to absolutely embrace the idea. Though our roots as a nation of people who ran away (but did so in a brutal, unforgivable fashion) seem increasingly distant, the maverick is still an oft-rewarded ideal to aspire to. Whether we are actually equipped to deal with the resultant tedium and loneliness that allow the romantic ideal to fluorish is a different matter, but the dreamer is encouraged, in theory if not in practice, to think of themselves, when convenient, as a lone wolf. The angstrom that forever separates us from others, that quite literally prevents any 'contact' - it is a divine and raving homunculus - a sliver of immortal quicksilver sliding sapient through the brain, rendering the madman holy.

But does this lifestyle pan out? Is it idle and accidental propaganda? "We" shall see...

9:48pm:

Predestination has run its course; inevitabilities have swollen up and burst like bevenomed pimples, spraying the sticky pus of predictability all over my immediacies: suddenly, folks, I've found myself in China.

Now I've never really been one to write about 'daily life' but I feel this is an abrupt enough change that it ought to receive some recognition on the old black-and-white. I've taken, of course, that morally ambiguous backdoor in that Canadians tend to take on their extended visits 'abroad' - but oh, in my own "chthonian" way I love this sprawling bastard aggregate of a language and suppose spreading my muddy take on its ambiguities to the reluctant spawn of status-seekers isn't necessarily tantamount to unforgivable colonialism. Oh, but is it? Between all the advice about 'lesson planning' and 'games' (the two of which, I take it, bleed together indistinguishably) where are the words of consolation (or reprimand!) for the youth who may have just become an imperialist stooge all out of his own interest in, and I hate to say it, 'tourism'?

..but that's just my JOB, and it's in everyone's best interests that we all pretend not to have them - that we tiptoe around the subject, treating spiritual deformity with the same feigned blushing ignorance that we would any aberration of mind or body.

I like this city; I am still in a period of early flirtation, but it is a relief to see a human hive operating outside the cut-and-dry bounds of the Canadian megopoli I know and blink at. Millions of people! Animals wandering the streets! Fires! Piles of debris! Everywhere a constant garage sale. Donkeys leading carts down the highway! People riding their motorcycles in the mall! Fantastic structures! There are sights to behold here, there is less sterility - it might simply be that homogenized 'control' bears a reversely proportionate relationship to the number of people in any given place... or is it that the 'control' I yet know simply takes on a different form, more marked with pretense and less devil-may-care? Brutality is brutality is brutality is...

2:48am:

THE LAMEST BAND I'VE EVER SEEN

I have met the decidedly minimal entry requirements necessary to be a 'veteran' of the local underground music scene. In the past I have participated in local music in most conceivable capacities; I have stared the punk rock hydra in all its homely faces, drank of the chalice and made my timely exit.

Any ex-punk can give you a neoromantic account of their personal journey through the grand guignol of their city's "scene", and the ineffable and mysterious changes that happened to them along the way. Never mind that most people are most receptive to punk rock when they are of an age when they are most likely to be predisposed to sweeping sentiment and 'ineffable and mysterious' changes are going to be happening to them anyway; the topic is too dear to my heart to be so skeptically dismissed, and anyway I'm pretty sure that anyone unfortunate enough to have spent their youth in a place like nineteen-nineties Calgary is going to get more post factum mileage out of hanging around at all ages rock shows than out of, say, homework and television. Today (despite my still tender years) I feel it would be very easy to wax poetic about a youth oversaturated with rock and roll: I have a smelly tour bus full of winsome nostalgia, a stocked merch table of armchair sociology, and a community hall packed past 'fire hazard' with lamentations about what-might-maybe-have-been.

Yet alongside all of that syrupy teenage bombast, there was a lot of tedium to the execution of most punk shows. Memory has a merciful way of cancelling out banality, so we have to rely on objective analysis to determine that many hours were spent waiting for people to show up, for momentum to gather; many long queues of people demanded change and stamped hands; many black cords and boxes had to be moved into and out of vehicles. And though I was more forgiving as a teenager than I am now in my premature middle age, we cannot deny that a lot of time was spent watching what were essentially bad bands. Where there are youths gathered to make music there fluorishes any number of regrettable sonic decisions: the flat-out incompetence, the shopworn schmaltzy showboating that was endemic when the much-maligned "emo" genre was in ascendence, the limp displays of misdirected aggression that accompany timorous testosterone... I was a willing participant in many a crime against aesthetics, often conscious of the fact, but rarely did it matter. Why did this go on? Enough people have written enough about the redeeming viscerality of underground music - and, if you can get past all of the glowing praises heaped upon Musicians and their Works, they generally make a pretty good point.

Fast-forward to the present - the speed of the operation blurs the reasons given for vanishing from 'the' 'scene', and reduces all of those concerts I have seen since - from the perspective of an audience member, rarely as a participant - to a notated list of practical decisions, selected after considering quality and weighing options. Music is rarely taken in without some assessment of its value being made ahead of time; there are always duds here and there, but most of the ostentatiously appalling groups seem to be playing those outdoor college bbq's to which they are appropriately suited. If I enjoy something I enjoy it; if I don't, it's easy enough to forgive with mere empathy and the indifference it heralds when it is fully exercised - I know what it is to be making music, particularly very bad music. Very rarely am I forced to watch anything. Last weekend I was not, of course, forced to watch the lamest band I have ever seen.

I wish I could fall back on the old cliché "nothing prepared me for this", it feels natural to write but it would be describing complete opposite of the scenario. One of the reasons that the band was so lame was that EVERYTHING prepared me for the experience; the sounds of instruments I am familiar with played competently through industry-standard amplifiers is nothing new to me. Punchy 2/4 rhythms and a bass guitar thumping along with the root notes underpins an electric keyboard droning majors and fifths through an 'organ' patch and a guitar occasionally venturing off to play a melody for a measure or so before joining in with distorted barre chords again. That they played 'competently' is key; ironically they avoided both energy and sloppiness, either of which would have humanized the group and triggered the empathy response. To watch the band was to watch human simulacra; telepaths in the audience became frustrated and confused when they got no readings from them - everyone who wasn't staring at the stage gradually began to puzzle over when the set change music had ended and the live band had begun. On the scale measuring quality (1) against incompetence (-1), this band somehow managed to play at an unwavering (0).

On an only somewhat related note:

When a band has pretensions towards stardom it may try to achieve its dreams by walking the bureaucratic line not charted by any previous example but imagined into being by the parade of shysters who will 'manage', 'promote', 'represent' one's group for a fee. That anything approaching true posterity in the music world sprung from maverick means is overlooked or suppressed by those who would systematize it, integrate it with industries in some kind of smash-and-grab micromanagement scheme. Many years ago, a sloppy/noisy/rag-tag anarchopunk group I played with found itself in a 'battle of the bands' feud with the most homogenous straight-and-narrow cadre of prefab alterna-rockers you could ever imagine. We lost, as the legend goes, by one vote. As of 2006 both bands are broken up but we, thank Satan, don't have boxes of XL t-shirts and 8*10 signed glossy photos of ourselves collecting dust in our basements.

1:19am:

WHAT IS HE DOING

Out of all the species of dialogues that can be shared, In-Jokes are perhaps the most precious and the most mysterious. Ideas are rarely both cute and enormously powerful; the in-joke is like a wily cherubic Cupid - the naive, innocent twinkle in its eye somehow excuses the wanton lust for chaos in its deeds as it lobs arrows into the cosmology of discourse.

It is like what I imagine the 'Pikachu' character is meant to signify within the (again) cosmology of the aggressively-marketed Pokemon product line of the late nineties. The Pikachu, if sentient at all, is either a zen master or a psychopath; it maintains its moony-eyed glee in a world where bloody pitfights to the death are routine. The implications of a pet that is as adorable while cuddling against your feet as it is while eviscerating your foes can perhaps be most neutrally described as "Freudian"

I am, after all, only hazarding a guess as to the beast's nature here because I am, after all, of the generation that is aware of the NAME of the mascot in the Pokemon franchise but totally unaware of anything else regarding the show (or was it a trading card game?...). The idea we have of it is a ragged piecework cobbled together entirely through advertising.

Perhaps, augmenting this advertising, there's the occasional lengthy and one-sided "conversation" about it we find ourselves sharing with one of compromised social skills here, or the inevitable evening of babysitting a preteen by watching its parents' TV with it there. These kinds of circumstances are totally hypothetical, yet have with 100% certainty occured to someone who is now in their much-hyped "twenties". And yet the erstwhile advertisers of "Pokemon" have (with the same impressive odds on certainty again) taken this into account.

Isn't it embarassing when you meet someone of your selfsame age, to look at them and silently realize "here's somebody who was exposed to the same advertising that I was as a child... we could potentially burst into a little pas de deux recital at any moment". This can happen with nearly anybody, provided the date given on their birth certificate falls in the right range. But it is only with a very select few that one can, with a certain knowing pride, repeat an old in-joke.

TROUBLE'S A-BREWING

If you have the kind of personality that wants to believe it shares a "defining event" with its "generation", there are all kinds of events and ideas you can point to which contributed the zeitgeist. It is embarassing to know that ads are even AMONG those events over which people can bond over - and moreover WILL bond over, since everyone who was exposed to a television in the nineties has SOMETHING they still remember, and the socially inclined will sooner or later find themselves involved in a conversation riffing on "remember this one...". Over the corpses of old advertising campaigns new friendships can be built, but need I remind you of the danger of zombies? The mutually remembered ad is the in-joke's sinister twin, just as advertising is the brutally hostile sister of conversation.

The nineteen-nineties were home to a dog's breakfast of ideas and aesthetics - the culture of the decade seems scattered, oblique and totally unjustifiable. A murky historical backwater, no one will know what to think about it until its quondam teenagers are old enough to sell "teen nostalgia" to. Then we will get a Ken Burns-style documentary illuminating the key events and personalities of the decade, transforming al;l that unpredictable teenage chaos into a convenient narrative. Advertisers selling our history back to us warp the tale in a hamfisted attempt to wring some coherence out of it... drawing parallels where there were none, claiming epigones as founders, attributing too many subtle changes to too few dramatic icons...

...and how will those of us who were teenagers in the nineties correct these errors? Will we be too busy or too burnt out to do it? Our experience of those years was too emotional to be precise. Teen years are a persistent hallucination, they seem unreal because we cannot possibly imagine repeating the decisions we made. Our minds do not work that way anymore; today we would never come to any of the conclusions we did ten years ago. We experience the nineties as the hand-me-down memory of an intimate stranger, like fragments of its former eggshell eaten by a freshly-hatched reptile.

What can anyone do except try to remember everything that has ever happened to them? And what better way to recapture the state of one's way-back-when mind than to recall a retired in-joke?

2:24am:

A HORROR STORY

At midnight I was outside, swaddled in a blanked on the “deck” behind my parents' house. This structure made me uneasy because it seemed to be constructed entirely out of synthetic wood: plastic 2x4's assembled into a deck as though they were just regular planks of wood conjoined by your average carpenter. Decorated with “woodgrain” patterns yet blatantly synthetic, this material came off like a kind of adult Lego.

According to the three of five senses I consulted about this wood, it was synthetic. Logically it would follow for me to believe in its artificiality, but somehow I just could not completely accept this conclusion. I was not willing to accept my senses’ assurances that ‘fake wood’ was a part of my tangible universe. It’s not that I was appalled by it, truth is I barely had any emotional reaction to it at all. It’s just that on some subconscious level it contradicted the latent criteria I use to differentiate between the plausible and the implausible. Fake wood, even only as an idea, seemed slightly too bourgeois to be real.

But –only- slightly; the notion was unequivocally but not unforgivably tacky. It was an outrageous consumerist sneer, but outrageous –only- due to the subtlety with which it exuded its depravity. Fake wood is stupid but not offensively stupid; it is at best an apocryphal insult to good taste.

I was also willing to consider the possibility that all this wood is genuine and that though once part of an honest-to-god tree, treatment with a preservant left it looking like tupperware. That the wood isn’t fake, it’s just been heavily fortified with scotch-gard. A chemical has been applied to prevent termite infestation. A paste has rendered the deck completely waterproof. That compared to this, any other porch is basically dessicating like a sliced apple in the sun.

Maybe someone bit off more than they could chew in taking on the DIY construction of a back porch, and when the exhausting and mishap-laden process was finally complete they angrily swabbed the decks with preservatives, shouting “this is just so I’ll NEVER have to do that again!”.

I had been interested recently in the idea of the “Uncanny Valley”. The sense of positivity, empathy and acceptance that a human bears towards a robot is said to increase as the robot’s similarity to a human figure increases -- but when a robot is very but not quite similar to a human it will be met with revulsion -- until the robot is exactly similar to a human, at which point the empathy will be at its highest. On a line chart plotting Y, the positivity of a human’s response against X, a robot’s human verisimilitude, the ‘uncanny valley’ is the area where the x=y line immediately and unexpectedly drops off before ascending back to (1,1).

So I thought: maybe the nature of this material making up the deck was so difficult to determine because it landed right in the uncanny valley describing my personal response to wood. In that emotional blind spot, during that lunar eclipse of the faculties, the makeup of the product was indeterminable to me. The ridiculous suburban affectation had caused a syntax error in my mind.

Later on, Wikipedia would tell me that this wood-plastic composite is actually a second-generation recycled product, environmentally viable, and certainly not sinister. I would be embarassed because I hadn’t even considered that option. I would wonder if maybe my so-called “austere tastes” are actually veiled neophobia.

But anyway there I was, standing on a deck made of wood-plastic composite, in the northeast corner between the obtuse screen door protrusion to the left and the Rubbermaid garbage bin to the right, in the middle of a goofily reprehensible act. Yes, I was in a very embarassing position: I was a “grown man” surreptitiously hanging out behind his parents' house.

6:24pm:

RECLAIM THE BLAME
or
IN DANGER LIKE THIS PAUSE AT FIRST AND WAIT

for the time being let us forget the tale which leads us out of the wilderness, through random industrial towns in North Ontario, through bits of desert, next to various and sundry travel partners of the aggressive male sort - finally plopping down into the very clutches of that very Thing Which Cannot Be Named, teasing it as a skipping stone teases an abyss below (cf. the number 29, for the esotericists in the room)... you get the picture. these events are all apocryphal to this stubborn anti-narrative, the tale can only continue as long as the protagonist still doesn't know where exactly he (and i suppose this one is a "he") is.

so the protagonist: youth, unshaven, still young enough to want to casually indicate something with his appearance - tattoos that can be charitably described as 'pagan' decorate dull sunburned flesh, a t-shirt bearing some hanzi text next to the golden G of the freemasons, oversized polychromatic sunglasses. ergo: if any thesis could be extracted from this flamboyance, it would be 'the self-reVerential irony of the hip youth can still be infused with magick, but today's hip youth balks at the concept even more than at its "misspelling"'.

despite this, he is healthy and attractive, a strapping young lad despite the seething misanthropy -- but if cornered, the HATE (let's not mince words) can be excused as an embarassing rearrangement of the HEAT, and suspicion will be replaced by that unique relief that a conversational byroad into a reconcilable topic can bring.

"yeah, it's a real scorcher!"

and our protagonist is cycling. this should come as no surprise - what else is the hanged man to do in babylon but cycle and sputter? his preoccupations run the usual gamut, but when he is cycling he is mostly interested in thinking about cycling. there is no romance to speak of, but the very absence of such things is often more evocative than a faint presence; the binary feature cannot help but evoke its twin, we know just what is in store for old yin and old yang, etc. he has realized that he is comfortable in his body, but could be more comfortable if he surrendered it completely to whim - why bother denying this urge to repeatedly lift heavy things? questioning his capacity as a cyclist, he reminds himself that if nothing else he always bikes UP the hills that he sees others walking. we tread gently across a few symbolic bridges to the concept of 'masculinity' and dwell there for a while, trying to see past the confusion and the monstrosity...

...and it is at this point when we meet the antagonist of the tale, or rather when we ride by him. an older male, possibly in his early 50s. a manicured silver moustache indicates that he is virile enough to grow thick facial hair, but systematic enough for the quotidian shave. designer sunglasses, spandex cycling wear implying a bodysuit, efficient upscale racing bike with neat and balanced saddlebags, massive calves, the man exudes health and wealth. except: he is stopped at the side of the road, speaking on a cell phone. our protagonist speeds past him, spending a moment to take all of this in.

and perhaps it is the amorphous 'masculinity' in his mind that leads him to think this, but the thought dawns: is this the only way to achieve any personal redemption in babylon (or just any immediate relief), to overtake the wealthy at the innocuous sport of cycling, to use frankenstein hand-me-down beaters to overtake so many schwinns and shimanos? to prove that even on some basic and primitive level there is one queue you cannot buy your way out of...

...and it is at this point that our protagonist passes the rich man again. once more, he is stopped by the side of the road, speaking on a cell phone. this is truly odd; at no point since their last encounter had any cyclists been passed by any others. does this mean that the rich man knew of some shortcut? as well as a quick cyclist who can buy top-of-the-line equipment, he has his wits about him too. nevertheless, he is on the phone and he is passed by once again...

it is easy to think of the rich as inbred libertines, crude grotesqueries mocking pre-Victorian "persons of quality", decorum and empty ritual caked on like foundation covering up so much dullness and ugliness. our protagonist knows this is one of his personal blind spots, but is not particularly troubled by it - he has chosen to live in a world where symbols are absolutely necessary, and sometimes these symbols must subsume people. he can afford to feed the wealthy, so culturally alien, into the forge. nothing will be lost. they are expendable.

but the chase is on, and this man that will be on his tail at any moment is not the phrenology text's drooling duke. this is the athletic yuppie, a beast concerned with efficiency and result. as long as you do not disturb the equilibrium, he will not see you. thoughts no longer deal with triumphant life-hack solutions to the problem of living in babylon, they deal with the very mechanisms of survival therein: how to best outbike this guy? legs pumping with a new resolution, our protagonist soldiers on...

...until he is passed. the other bike darts ahead, the man says "thanks!" as the youth moves aside. so is this a losing battle?

perspective strikes: why has this figure overtaken the cars as the rival out here? why has the unity between cyclists been tossed aside for symbolic aggression? at this point 'cyclist' is the only group that he can claim belonging to with a straight face - anonymous, ambivalent, flexible and more-or-less haphazardly in conflict with the status quo, he can think of no reason NOT to desire participation. this man filling the role of the oppressive archon is not even driving a car, and is likely deliberately deciding not to. the horrors of THAT mode of locomotion are immediately apparent, the very real threat posed to EVERYONE by them cannot be ignored, it is nothing short of cynical for anyone to participate in society as a driver, a lethal convenience junky, etc... this train of thought can go on and on indefinitely (unlike the car, ironically).
so are we so obsessed with conflict that anyone will become the day's rival? can this be a lesson in unity, a chisel-blow against the massive erratic of prejudice? in today's world, in all of its grand and unrivalled absurdity, isn't "non-driver" enough of a reason to LIKE somebody?

...and it is with these thoughts in his mind that our hero cycles past the rich man again. the scene is no different: he has stopped on the side of the road to receive another phone call.

~~~~~~~~

"I was thinking we could have fish and chips for dinner, something quick before the interview."
"Sounds fine, do you want me to pick anything else up?"

...And the punk zooms by. Even before I hang up my phone, I can hear the chain scraping against the derailer with each rotation of the pedals. There are tools he can use if he wants that bike to last. All he would need to do is shift it over a few millimeters - if you know what you're doing, all you need to do is tighten certain screws. Why don't people consider these things?

But he is young. Would I have ridden so recklessly at that age? Listen to me, 'what would I have done?' - am I so old that I am thinking about my youth as a hypothetical situation? Maybe that is easier: to think of it as something that could be rather than something that just -was-. "Used to": I was used by someone to ride a bicycle in a certain way. My role, my agency was my use -- and now I am used to be efficient. I isolate problems, I propose solutions. A chain scraping against a derailer? Screwdriver, Phillips head. I used to be proud of knowing how to make these distinctions.
But still, I can outride him. I am skilled. My bicycle is sleek. I may have passed him by already without notice. The road is made of nothing but moving and stationary objects. The one implies the other.

"I just had a thought, could you get some olive oil too? You haven't reached the store yet, have you?"
"No, not yet. I'll pick some up."
"And maybe some wine? We can have some after the interview."
"Good idea."

And he passes me by again. The scraping sound is gone. I wonder if he would stop riding to answer a phone call? What does he think when he sees this old man stopping along one of the city's best routes to talk on the phone? What would I have thought... there I go again. Why worry about age? I am healthy, attractive, skilled, a good cyclist... a better cyclist than these kids. See, I'm about to pass him again.

"Thanks!"

Is this the only way to achieve immediate relief in the city? To pit myself against these strangers? I wonder if I could do it on a different bike. Am I actually proving anything to myself while I ride this speeder? Of course I am - I worked for this money, I did the research to determine the right bike for me, I ordered it and picked it up. Everything was streamlined. That was all a part of the process of this ride. It will be a part of the process of every ride I ever go on on this bike. And there will be many more.

"I hope you haven't gotten to the store yet. I found some olive oil in the pantry. I didn't know it was there."
"No, it's no trouble, I'm not there yet."
"Really? You're usually past Safeway by now."
"Fish and wine?"
"Fish and wine."

~~~~~~~~

When man comes back to the city in its present state, it is not for his personal satisfaction as a free being, but because he has a material work to do there. The very fact of having escaped the inner possession of the city's mysterious fascination is a serious disintegration of the deepest urban reality. Its only coherent reason for existing is as a spiritul power. When its power is broken, for eternity and in each one of us as inhabitants of the city, the city begins to literally fall apart. And the man who comes back after intelligently separating himself from it works as an acid to decompose the city's bonds.

2:46pm:

THE GRIM PILL'S PROGRESS
or
SPILLING MY SEED IN THE COLD DEAD GROUND EVERY DAY

"i have seen the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by cheap labour" opines Jose, a coworker and ally in The Struggle. i am hesitant to become so fatalistic yet myself - the sentiment holds true, but to superimpose this destruction onto oneself is to both "surrender" and, more humiliating, to include oneself in the lumpen aggregate of the hypothetical. these blanket statements do not apply to us, the polyvalent cynics making them - too insecure to discuss the personal, we diss-cuss the patina...

...which sometimes will manifest itself as an actual physical layer on our bodies. a coat of grime and insect bites (bites which I am opting for over the chemical spray, at least for now) is a mark with as much or as little metaphorical resonance as its wearer wishes: a sign of solidarity or a rapidly calcifying shell.

though if we wanted 'solidarity', we could quickly find it. the particular nietzschean streak we share brings a willingness to sacrifice everything for a chance to liquify inside a violent cocoon. the reasons motivating this choice, as far as can be intuitied or inquisited, fall into a few broad categories: a final grunting thrust at debt, reckless experimentation, there simply being nowhere else to "go"...

which defines a certain peregrine caste among canadian youth. transients on the hajj with no mecca. one garners suspicion by remaining stationary and unsettled, but is appalled by the prospect of setting up a homestead; who would want to 'settle down' in the mechanized morass? without a clear destination, no mythical 'san francisco' as described with suspiciously saccharine nostalgia by the travellers of a few generations past, the only option is unmitigated flow. to be a treeplanter, a reluctantly imperialist youthful "english teacher", a party-hearty ecstasy jock on a thai beach, one tries to live in the loophole and take advantage of a circumstantially-placed infrastructure. agents exist inside this to keep track of us, but the force of will of one who does not want to LIVE anywhere puts up some spiritual force... 'some' being key. not the neoromantic punk travelers watching sunsets and scrounging coffees, we are admittedly part of a less appealing league: convenience jockeys in transit, solipsists running from the static, the capillaries open up (blown open by niacin, bolstered by citrus bioflavinoids and rutin, escorted through the blood brain barrier - three b's, like the irate vitamin, we notice - with a dose of phosphatidyl choline) and we, blood and brain and all, are pointlessly propelled.

but... and it's the big but... who would want to live in "This" ?

From my favourite book:

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpend that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity - most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World cna supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide... though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker, "Good morning folks, this is Heidelberg here we're coming into now, you know the old refrain, 'I lost my heart in Heidelberg', well I have a friend who lost both his ears here! Don't get me wrong, it's really a nice town, the people are warm and wnoderful - when they're not dueling. Seriouslyh though, they treat you just fine, they don't just give you the key to the city, they give you the bung-starter!" u.s.w. On you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing - castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colours come and go. There ar estops at odd hours of the mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, thbrowing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting - 'passengers will now reclaim their seats' as much as you'd like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight... as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity - but there is meanwhile this trip to be on... over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: "Once, only once..." One of their favourite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle - that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekulé, have taken the Serpent to mean..

3:24pm:

THE PARADOXICAL PHASE
or
THE SONG REMAINS THE SHAME

Pvt. K'uehlourz reporting from the Northern Canadian outback hippie army - or is it the "evil hippie", the archetype that we have all had good clean fun trying to pin down and define, that is in fullest force? Moustaches, bandanas, grubby fingernails, louche designs on various young men and women percolating, plans A through Z -- though THIS guy is wearing a scanty beard and a crude Axl Rose headwrap, links of chain interlaced through bandana'ed skulls - yes, a bandana bedecked in pictures of other bandanas -- bebandanaed! The most ridiculous items become sources of comfort in this most ridiculous of places where I am living.

Like a brown t-shirt, silkscreened in a mall vanity shop, featuring a dunne rooster and the word "Cockfighter" in tidied and legible gothic script. The insouciance of the shirt is clear, but where is the source of humour - did someone design this shirt as a humourous feint to contain the word "cock", or is it an actual proclamation of a very unpopular interest? it is either bold or mistakenly ironic - the veil needed to slip in the cheeky COCK being a much bloodier and less acceptable concept than the little nest of plosives itself.

six days of planting (in a row, no less, in violation of the apparent union contract that we are officially operating under, made difficult to access because the top brass have a hard time telling us which union precisely we are actually paying dues to) leaves a boy in a pained niacin fit - or is it the free-flowing whiskey from the night before? shifts end in 'party night', a free-for-all satyricon where planters, still sliding into gradual comfort with one anothers' presence, drink and brag. the brass encourage all matter of scandalous behaviour - the theory being that if the depraved hippies spend their weeknights fucking in the forest, another dangling carrot will be added to the bundle suspended above the mule's head (alongside those ruddy umber roots money, prestige, athleticism, killing time...). the camp seems very deliberately selected viz a viz gender lines, and a lot of them sure ACT really straight - THIS guy being a potential exception, acheiving renown in the community only for the dozen-or-so vitamin pills popped every night. i try to explain it but the planters do not sem pleased with the stream-of-consciousness conversational style - "well, the story basically starts with a man named Bill Wilson". consequently and predictably, no one has been visiting MY tent in the wee hours - but perhaps no nighttime companions is just what i want.

conversation! i miss the wit, folly, frivolities of the garden of friends i have cultivated elsewhere. here i am more-or-less alone, and more-or-less nonplussed about the prospect of talking about work after work (if that tenuous time will ever actually exist until 2-3 months from now) - "SO, HOW MANY DID YOU PLANT TODAY?" is a dreadful and boring question. so naturally, we arbitrarily pick one receptive-seeming person onto whom to mercilessly pour out the theorizing, the paranoia, the shouting into the semantic web and recording its vague echoes.

the paranoia IS there: the brass must familiarize themselves with our strengths and our weaknesses to assign us to certain 'crews', put us in certain busses, ask that we plant certain pieces, etc. i have found a sympathetic ally in one of the 'crew bosses', or at least an ally willing to entertain my desire to plant by myself. no one to decide upon directions and lines with, personal land-management systems reliant on geometries that certain secret societies have been struggling for generations to articulate effectively, surely i cannot do the same on the fly with a grunting, sunbaked crewmate busy with their own interal monologues. the brass 'talk about us', and tell us that they have been 'talking about us' - my only recourse is to try to collect as much dirt on them as they are contractually bound to collect on us, and to see who gives up in the mercyfight first.
ergo, a survival strategy emerges: get through the gulag by playing at one of my favourite sports, wanton data-gathering and PCM espionage!

and yes, drinks night did wonders for that endeavour, eventually pitting this rank-and-file against the ruddy-faced 'camp manager' in a paradoxical tug-of-war wherein we both voiced our complaints and then whoever could SYMPATHIZE with the other more gained the upper ground. though the fact remains, all of the environmental hardships (rain! snow! blackflies!) can be chalked up to "you have to come to expect this at planting", but the financial hardships ("we can't pay you a per-tree rate today") cannot be swept under the same rug. and let it be known, not once did this Pvt. complain about the weather.

surrealism is to be expected and grows exponentially. the benchmark may be the bombed-out clearcut moonscape that we are to walk over (and over, and over) every day. though recently i sat next to a french man, dressed entirely in yellow PVC rubber with a rainhat, drinking vodka from a bowl and bemoaning "i just want to take a girl, man. i want to take them all!".

...and the TIME LIMIT is up. see you when i finally decide where to MOVE next (really, any info on places-to-crash opening up sometime in July would help this soldier out).

2:46pm:

PERSPECTIVES ON PROCRUSTREAN PROGRESS
OR
THE PLANTER'S PARADIGM

few deleria match those encountered on a four-day greyhound trip. i have spent that much time on the 'hound once before, traveling from richmond, virginia to calgary, alberta, and this most recent trip from victoria to thunder bay opened that interexperiential portal the way that only apposition can. a day in one surrenders to wakesleep; in the nighttime one stares at the television's reflection in the window and its more veracious counterpart mounted to the coach ceiling as though staring into the fiery eyes of a mechanical totem. the greyhound washroom is an aluminum chamber, all pitch and yaw, a low-rent carnival ride providing the final opportunity to catch one's own reflection. that doppelganger has eluded me for a week now, last appearing in polished stainless steel, now fading back into the material world to present itself to me as a hazy silhouette in the thunder bay public library. it feels good to live without a reflection.

thunder bay feels like it has not changed since i was last here, a decade ago. the city is cavernous and heavily-spaced, hinting at previous bustles during time when outward expansion was still in vogue; nana-bijou has since risen from the sea and eaten these settlers. the population lies digested in the bottoms of silver mines, i am the only pedestrian here.

"Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery."

now i live in a nylon tent, foolishly placed on a dried-out bog a few days before "the rains" began. the water seeping in is my unique problem, the heavy winds that ensure the tent remains in permanent shifting mutation are a problem shared among the other 5 dozen folk camping out in the same area. to go to sleep is a zen exercise, one must achieve perfect tranquility in a relentlessly violent chamber. niacin, tramadol and omnipresent 5-htp conspire to make sure i enjoy the experience.

what is boot camp in canada's hippie army like? no one had adequately described the situation to me before i headed out, but with time and hindsight i would like to try to document it. i do not have this hindsight yet; i have only been there for a week. free food (higher tone than any routine diet i have had before) and 'shelter' are traded for labour, the likes of which i did not anticipate. i expected myself to reinvented as a needle on a massive sewing machine, moving by a set number of steps and spilling my seed upon barren ground at regular intervals. it turns out the process involves a lot more finesse and a lot less brutality; the terrain is wet and hilly, covered in fallen logs and organic matter rendered chunky mulch by forestry automata, most of the labour involves appropriate "microsites" selection before any arboreal onanism. this, i suppose, is why my new trade has yet to be overtaken by machines. many particularities must be observed; the trade, it turns out, is all about relentless precision.

do i like it? is that even relevant? boot camp seems an atavistic tradition experienced by most young humans, and despite the cynic AND the realist in me, the romantic shouts loudest that this experience might as well be experienced. or that, in being an "experience" it inherently grants itself the right and necessity to be experienced. the mystic declares that this will soon become a rich memory to mine. the coward declares that i am making money. the vagrant hunkers down into its brief ad hoc home and wonders where it will go next. (honestly, any suggestions?).

"The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Ewven in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

3:59am:
SOME GNOSTIC WORDS OF CONSOLATION FOR THE YOUTH MOVING TO THE WILDERNESS:

it seems unreasonable to believe that mental states now will be constant. one often goes through the process of change so thoroughly that the two individuals the change produces, the individual before and the individual after the change, would never even be able to communicate with one another. the individual after could never fundamentally get across the nature of the change to the individual before. its effects are present only in retrospect.

do not forget that: every day we spontaneously begin to understand new ideas which had never been a part of our thoughts the day before. new perspectives are revealed to us steadily. the perspectives offered may seem to grow smaller and smaller in scope with each subsequent revelation, but what is more likely is that ones pallette of available perspectives has grown larger. in light of everything we experience, it is one hundred percent reasonable to conclude that a being's natural senses will shift their parameters routinely. polarities will completely reverse; past polarities will only begin to exist again when a future moment of insight jogs the memory of the past reality tunnel. i remember at least two distinct and separate conversations which defied linear perception to such an extent that the surrounding environment seemed to be less stable and fixed than the words being spoken. there is no reason why this will not happen again (and again, and again...)

you will never discover an end to synchronicity. it will continue to be as primal and satisfying to upend it. synchronicities are real and good and there will seems to be no reason to cease acknowledging and recording them. real synchronicity will teach us something about the nature of the universe. there seems to be no difference between the feeling described as 'joy' and the feeling described as 'divine revelation'. chains of synchronicity are so vast in their scope that they can be approached from any direction. 'joy' is one of these directions; you can make it the eternal point of departure.

cynicism could only be left to attack the most deserving targets, the ones that actually threaten us. it does not need to be overextended. the most satisfying way to react to new creations is as though they were made by a loved one. changes so far have been fundamentally joyful things. to realize one has gone through a change is like stumbling into a surprise party. why would you ever expect changes to stop? the revelations will keep coming.

2:28pm:

FAREWELL TO VICTORIA


So perhaps this is presumptuous, but is there anyone in the Toronto area who needs a roommate this summer, and/or has a backyard with a tent-sized void that is waiting to be filled?

In a few days I am headed off to troll around in Northern Ontario, digging holes for an indefinite amount of time. But I would like to return to 'the city' after this is through, and Toronto seems to win out in terms of proximity and mystique.

But is it a possibility?

10:56am:
I have made a new zine and would like to send it "out" to as many friends as I can before I leave Victoria where my stamps, envelopes, etc are all squirreled away (~3 weeks from now). If you leave me your mailing address here, I will send one to you.