a boss for us

hello my friend

my friend?

there is nothing to see down that street

i'm not trying to see anything

where are you going?

i'm not going anywhere

come into my store

i don't have any money

money is not a problem

all money is is a problem

2020 blindness

were embarrassed by everythıng that emerges from us least of all shıt and most words but we accept all emergence equally pathetıc democrats that we are even as we accept all words as ınnately embarrassıng whether they seem to flow from us or others for the source as you reverse paddles the same

 

so we ȷump ahead or ıs ıt back to 2020 now and do a redux on the ınternatıonal wanderıng scene none of thıs ıs mıchaux on the napo or ın kolkata somethıngs happened ın the past century to travel and so ıts log drıfts dıfferently down the current

 

whıle 2017 had a groundıng thread throughout we actually talked about our experıences ın the real places we were ın 2020 begıns to detach from ıts surroundıngs one entry sıgılıngs other than ıts drawıngs appears to have nothıng to do wıth the vıvıd ındıa around and well see by 2025 abstractıons almost fully set ın and the subȷect of that logs less any factıve based ımpressıons of where we are and what we see and smell than the generatıon of langwıch sensatıons as the souls bombarded wıth the pıth of global movement and the beauty of foreıgn ındıfference

 

ısnt thıs the way wıth all thıngs though the real recedes wıth famılıarıty or rather the ırreal ın us changes clothes as the shapes around us change theırs

sauerkraut in india

fukky risotto and a sadoo are riding the marudhar express when a tourist across the way says - look, there’s the taj mahal. the sadoo says no that’s the mona lisa. the tourist looks confused and annoyed, says it’s obviously the taj mahal. the sadoo says you obviously know nothing about signs

jokes for outliers

 

the air india attendant at narita asks to weigh my carry-on - limit 7kg. i know it’s over because of the food. so i take out the food, put it on the floor and weigh my bag without it: 6.5kg. take the bag off the scale, return my food, leave

 

more jokes. a german, a swede, and a canadian are sitting on the rooftop of a guest house ...

 

why travel? –

• to record humanity in its dusty dusk
• to resavour the wilderness
• to hear the silent song of the plant
• to keep the bow taut (for contrast, for the sameness of things)
• to see the moon and sun
• to trip over time’s mirrors
• to reanimate death
• to ask this question
• to have the eyes scrubbed and the body bodied
• to virtualize nature and skin the internet
• to re-eroticize absence and presence
• to participate, however tentatively and disdainfully, in my fellow species’ orthodoxy - money
• to immerse myself in that film about flesh, the common human plot - and there plot that plot in words
• to put poetry in its place and replace place
• to glorify unpasteurized organic sauerkraut

varanasi and jerusalem - coital spirit partners in the production of religious babies (with astounding longevity)

you see, in this world, there's one awful thing, and that is that everyone has their reasons

if you don't know the rules, you're crushed - but if you do you're cut off from your own nature

so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and so angry, so innocent and so dangerous ...

depicting the failure of love, the failure of society, and the failure of humans to rise above the ridiculous

 

do indians get sick when they visit the west because it's too hygienic?

everyone on these longhaul international flights just sleeps or watches movies - don’t they have minds to use while briefly transiting through life?

 

whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate

                but we have a drug for this!

 

i see the world is mad

if i tell the truth they rush to beat me

if i lie they trust me

  keep the slanderer near, build it a hut in your courtyard -

  for, without soap or water, it will scrub your character clean

gote noats

the proprietor of a guest house says he plays the tabla. i ask him if he plays out anywhere, in public. no, i only play for god. probably doesn’t tweet either

 

the night lit loggias of bundi cornea of aravalli, sockets of worms, apertures onto the days when junglī suar wandered protected on a greener, less regulated, and threedimensionally more vicious earth

 

the 5hour bus from jaipur to bundi in its 49 numbered seats holds 71 passengers, 8 on top, 9 goats, obese sacs of produce heaped mercilessly in the aisles, 3 employees (driver, bus manager, ticket operator), no washroom or a/c - it’s midday and 34°. deluxe, the agent had told me. my body doesn’t fit anywhere, only hindi’s spoken, no shocks on this bitch and the road’s all hole ... i’m a conscious turd flushed onto the laughing dirt when the receptacle of hadoti finally welcomes.

i had hardly believed him

the celebrations, festivities, pancoloured noise, parades occur multiple times daily. gods, death, marriage, birth (and what’s the bloody difference?). some ridiculouslooking male dressed in a silver suit and flowers is plunked on a horse that’s so weighted in decoration how can no one laugh or protest (where’s friedrich when you need him ... maybe b. tarr can direct the bundi horse)? a few dudes beat relentlessly on big drums for 30 minutes before the procession - which includes the requisite 20 following females and blaring tuktuk - begins to jolt and belch its way eastward. it’s all religion and it’s all the time

a bordeaux man - almost comically friendly, pulls up a small stool to sit and chat to me, misses the stool falling on the floor (feel like i’m in a chaplin skit) - asks me how long the flight is home. about 15 hours i say. i thought it wouldn’t be much longer than paris he says - isn’t there a way you can just zip over the arctic?

 

in my homeland i never say i’m a writer. in that world of privilege as language and language as privilege such a designation is too pretentious, wearied, photocopied, easy, meaningless ... lumping me with gangling cheese strings of humans i have no affinity with, embarrassments to language, nocost writing, workshop factories, bud lights of Word. but here i use it as an efficient conversationending explanation for why i don’t do tourist things but sit stupidly around staring into space like an incarnation of the god Vapid. everyone (europeans, indians) seems satisfied, asks no further questions. you're a writer, you don't belong, they get it

 

the second night in rajasthan i ascend to the rooftop terrace of my guesthouse and a young french couple is dimly fucking on a chair. is clearing my throat sufficient international language? should i pull up a chair and watch, yank my dick out and cum on their faces? i go to a table, pull out my notebook and begin writing. i could abdicate the public space to their intimacy but to fuck in public is to invite voyeurism. i don't care about watching or listening though and they seem indifferent to my indifference, i just want to be alone on the rooftop with my devouring horny notebook

 

taragarh fort

the taragarh fort is the only place i can go here where people are thoroughly absent, where i’m actually alone. no eyes. 700 years old and unmaintained, a glory pervades the place, which was made - like most of civilization’s structures - for killing. crumbling staircases and paintings (a place made by goblins kipling comments), weedy courtyards, algae and guano stepwells, room and turret enfolding in nested surprise (this place could never be public in the west - it's too full of litigation potential!), i meet no one in my 4 hours wandering this monstrous beauty. it was made for this - failure, dilapidation, emptiness. monkeys and i are the only sign of mammalian life. the honks and bands of bundi are silent, the sleepy omnipresent activity which hangs from every aperture like laundry tucked away, endless religion ... shut up, the dead mughals are almost likeable in their deadness

 

structures are not built for their stated purposes but for what they become after their purposes have left. in the first silence i’ve had since the brief interludes i had in hawai’i i understand why things are built, this human rabidity - for the invested humans to die, their memory to be lost, their visions forgotten, their sufferings and killings made irrelevant, and something to emerge from the uninhabited spaces that speaks of a vigorous purity, a meditative integration directly unachievable by a species so committed to compartmentalization, mononarrative, destruction

 

a ruinous fort teaches me this, and why human society has become for me the noise of a broken muffler collapsing down a mountainside

in losing purpose, purpose is found

propreantepenultimate

 

the dogs wake me every morning between 0300 and 0400 for their scheduled street fight - sorting the day’s hierarchy? a requisite sacrifice, maiming, exile? as if hundreds of canine demons are auctioning their souls on the block of eternal hunger, an experimental band barely clinging to the cliffs of sound jamming on that nearby abandoned rooftop. institutional and community life without their euphemisms, a polycacophonous rooster birthing the corruption of the day. i sit on my bed of camels for the hour’s free concert - war eventually exhausting itself (jabes writes within the human moral realm even evil must sleep) - this audio textbook of history, resting afterwards on the grass of dreams

while this town is softer, gentler than many in northern india, it inevitably has its aggressions. only here have motorcycles and tuktuks aimed for and hit me - though lightly, as they stopped - always young men thinking it a joke. others - of the same tribe - sneer as they pass, spitting at my feet. less subtle than the routine aggressions of my home culture. pros and cons

 

though tourists are here, they’re relatively few and disappear once out of town on the rural roads. there i’m a sufficient novelty that the contents of every fifth motorcycle are compelled to say hello, a decent percentage of these pulling alongside, i guess to fully manifest the exchange, ensure the visible tourist knows the indian exists

 

one gaggle of 3 boys (they all look 12 but the driver says he’s 18), initially amusing, circle back to me so many times, take uncountable selfies with me, ask me to record phrases in their phone then laugh outrageously, that i finally get annoyed and tell them to go home and watch porn

 

this is a town of bands. bandi. i’ve lost track of the number that have passed below - led by 6 or 7 male uniformed brass- and drum-players, followed by colourful females carrying jars. looks like pt barnum should emerge, with a topper and dancing elephants. (as music, i prefer the dogs fighting.) the animals as usual are insouciant, though the monkeys and humans watch, bound in camaraderie by their eyes

 

cows, despite being holy here, survive on plastic bag scraps and wire. their indifference to all manner of proximate abuse, noise, traffic is almost admirable. the dogs and wild boars too - the former often curled sleeping on the road during the day while vehicles go racing by honking loudly centimetres from their dreams. what trust! or rather what enculturation

the guest house i’m staying at is run by a family whose living area is the lobby.  sometimes i enter and 9 adult humans and 5 children are congregated, tv on, the tumbled troupe all gossip and screaming. i keep probiotics in their freezer and as i obtain a pill one morning an adult asks me what is your disease?

the proprietor’s son who does the cooking says you write too much. (that’s a new one.) reminds me of a recent paternalistic email from a bureaucrat in the housing co-op i live in - all power to the imagination! he hypocritically closes. these inane expressions of conformists, who are given residence in the house of language, born into the temple of imagination, growing to use their habitats, their birthrights, as walls and missiles. endearing in a sense i suppose. but the zoo after a few visits loses its appeal and one seeks possibility outside the societal cages of virtuous enforcement and obeisant commonplaces

 

for some reason i’m reminded - consciousness even yet sprouts through the hard soil of ubiquitous establishment and cliché - of bruno schultz, who knew his uselessness, and used it, despite the variegations of human force and treachery, to colour life’s long night

indira gandhi airport

what no one tells you is that the best place to hang out if you’ve got time to kill in the domestic area of t3 is the mcdonalds. no one’s there (is any indian stupid enough to pay ₹340 for a spicy mcchicken?), the eating area is spacious, clean, with large windows overlooking a plane-taxiing area. of course it’s the only time i feel slightly nauseous. i recover from mcgut with the most expensive g&t i’ve ever ordered but also a deliriously delicious one. i imagine the quinine killing all the malaria i contracted from the filthy ganga mosquitoes in varanasi, who are silent, small, and deadly ... like a good fart

an equally chipper spot - and no nausea - is by gate d62 - an immense vacant bright space right by the runways. only distant humans visible. a superb place for frisbee

this is a silent airport - there will be no flight announcements is posted around. but bad music is piped everywhere

 

there are prayer rooms, divided by the sexes, all are empty. right next to these is a medication room ... perhaps - as the signs are only in english - everyone’s praying in it

 

ubiquitous signage -

caring for mother nature

                                clean airport

                                clean india

have the signage people ever left the airport?

there’s more soap in this terminal than the rest of india combined ... why don't you export some to indian rail?

 

this has been awarded the best airport in the world 2 years in a row?

what makes it the best is that it smoothly instils happiness and gratitude in me despite or for being ripped off ... holy motherfucking ganesha, after surviving varanasi gandhi’s the blessed brilliant best for giving me the opportunity to pay ₹1,250 for a drink

parallel travel notes -

 

a tuktuk driver thinks i’m japanese. i guess all non-indians look alike

 

it’s not that air travel necessarily saves that much time over its land competition - certainly the former’s more suspect fiscally and ecologically - but air’s modes are more stimulating. getting from varanasi to bundi by train would have cost me $35 and taken 22 – 32 hours (1,000km), whereas plane+bus takes me 17 and costs 270 (not including the money i blow at airports and staying overnight in jaipur). but on the train i’m in a coffin-sized compartment, by air i have multiple stopping points, interstices of exploration. even in the sarcophagus of the plane cabin i’m relaxed, creative, amused, energetic. in the train-tomb i feel claustrophobic, numb, irritable, prehistoric. worth the extra $350? i’m working on the cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the psychic-aesthetic ledgers

 

the dude in front of me on the flight to jaipur reeks so badly of cologne i assume he’s dying of some noxious disease and has to use a potent olfactory tactic to mask it. such solipsistautism, in endlessly diverse manifestations, everywhere. i continue to develop my brand and smell, having become indifferent to others branding their solipsistautism sanity ... intelligence ... virtue ... power ...

 

the contrast between the short skinny indian man (a ubiquitous type) and the tall enormous kind (not uncommon) is astounding (the female spread looks smaller) - the gap seems larger than other ethnicities, as if 8 or 9 of the skinny sort could fit in the enormous one. reminds of the pharoah’s dream in the torah about the cows

 

the amusements in indian railway stations - hindi, followed by a colonial female brit english voice - train 54639 to allahamabad has been cancelled. any inconvenience is deeply regretted

                my asshairs it is

what do the 17,829 indians who have been waiting on platform 12 for 7 hours do now?

 

indians always seem to be almost walking into each other - aiming for other bodies. this isn’t simply that there are so many bodies - when there are obvious spaces for circumnavigation the other bodies still almost walk into me, avoiding my flesh at the last nanosecond (same with motorcycles and tuktuks). maybe it’s analogous to people clumping together in a largely empty theatre, a weird way to deal with our kenophobia. or maybe it's somehow linked to their avoidance of meat

 

i’d rather die in a plane crash than a train. in the latter i’d be mangled, tortured, severed, taking hours or days to die. a plane would be a few seconds or minutes. (i read recently of a united flight taking off from honolulu that blew a door and a bunch of passengers were sucked out with their seats [still strapped in] over the pacific - now that’s a good curtain, a ride worth the admission price)

i picture the plane going down, some malfunction, some seed of genealogies of litigations, padding the otiose pads of lawyers, my colleagues in wisdom screaming, frantic - i’d be calm, even laughing, like major kong at the end of dr. strangelove

 

taking off from delhi the western horizon at dusk looks like the earth’s smoking in a hammock of industry hanging from trees of forgetting. the sun drinks a bloody mary while the last metallic birds drop their young into time’s embers

                like liner on god’s dark eyeball

                lava from lilith’s pussy at the cliffs of her mons