I've begun to feel worthless, I mean - guilty of not fulfilling enough promises. But I still feel followed - why?! I ought to describe how nature and people laugh at us - for being ourselves. Civilization makes us feel most irresponsible when we simply try to be free. Freedom like mine isn't admirable anymore... I don't care too much what happens to me. Does that seem an excuse for laziness? How much money have I spent, that's the real question. Flying from Taipei to Kashgar is costly. I'll spend as much during the next sixty days of camping as I have already in a single week, jetting city to city... Today, everything must be done quickly enough, or not at all.

But who am I? What am I doing here? You will be lucky enough to answer that for me, friend. I am only one more David, and I'm going to Tibet to see the wilderness. I haven't grown a beard yet... Looking young - that's my good luck - and it can't last much longer. The illusions of youth are a great technique for concealing suspicions about self... Nobody need know what a burnt-out loser I really am...

How different this kind of half-honest writing will always be from the even sneakier, wilful prose of fiction. Slow ebbs the flow and up grows the construct, the idea answers for us. Perhaps all conventional writers choose to write fiction because the truth of their own lives is too close and too tender for their minds; the author's heart is too full and unable to articulate the incongruities, failings, triumphs and personal injustices of real life... Not true? You think you can? Oh that's my point. Fiction is made for transmuting the ineluctable truths into less painful stuff, into matter more readily apprehended. The verities of one's own life are forgotten for those of a hero's. It doesn't matter. Interchanging your dreams is easy now. To get out of the big jam and find a new lover, a new land to call home, a warm pond reflecting your minnows - whatever - you live your life, and I live mine. So, the new "truths" of fiction are supposedly more clear than the ones about your own simple story. Ah, but all authors know that their subliminal insights about self and loved ones are transported through the imagination into a newer, more comfortable world far removed from actual home and family. We write of other lives to escape our own; yet inevitably, we write to explain our own experience. This is why so many poor writers become fretful about confusing life with art, and so mistakenly warn against using life to make art... They haven't understood what art is. The finest authors know, just as the best novel is really as pure as contemplation, that art must wed with life - intimately and inexcusably.

I've fallen off my perch again. Ahem, pardon me: the challenge today isn't a novel, but the true story of a journey from city to wild Oriental lands. Nothing too unexpected ought to happen along the way because I want to come home alive. But WHY am I doing this? Because - I love riding my bike through natural places! After I get off the plane in Kashgar, in the westernmost province of China, Xinjiang, it's a long ride south into Tibet.

Taipei to Hong Kong. The only interesting thing that happened on the way was a light moment when I forgot my tickets in the travel agent's office and I had to endure a very slow elevator ride to beat shop-closing time. The astonished travel agent was more relieved than I.

Sorry - my shocked, grinning look of confidence must resemble permafrost - I'm the ultimate manque disguised as an exemplary of the flying free man... I feel so supine inside, a coat on a hanger in a closet, much retarded in my efforts at enlightenment and creativity. Personal aspiration and the cults of commercialized personality have gone far to occlude the collective soul in all artists. The Self - your self - is the enemy of Buddha and Jesus - even if you don't believe - and the self is the enemy of all poets, too. Take heart, and forgive yourself for losing your soul. That isn't Shakespeare, either. We all become meek and mighty, but only after we understand that we are all thieves; we are taught to take everything from each other. The morality we preach is not new: it never existed, except perhaps as a proposal - a suggestion of what to do... We are neither so mighty nor so wise as we imagine our gods to be - and that's why we need to imagine them, in fact. We invent divine intelligence to excuse our desire for a world that nature cannot admit... Forget it: you will find my metaphors offensive before enlightening. I prove my point, but quite unintentionally: writing is simply spontaneous...

My life is passed and all my labors are worthless. This is the conviction goading my consciousness and what's left of my conscience turns into a perpetual reminder of loss. A cliche pops into mind: worn-out wishes are like hides flayed raw. We stay shut up inside the silence of what we dare not utter... I'd rather make you wonder what I'm about - even till you turn off my book so you can go out and "have fun" instead... Meanwhile, the rest of the world suffers war and starvation. So, please - feel privileged - that I can bore you enough to make you ask, when AM I going to start travelling?

Be patient if you feel like it. But you know, honesty isn't a hot property. People at the heart of things are well-paid to lie whitely, blatantly - to themselves and to you. I prefer to do it privately. Feels more secure that way. Journalists and novelists of the soulful kind, we all tend to be impoverished and pay dearly for our spiritual "purity."

On Earth, each man and woman usually has only one or two big fears during the course of their whole lives... Like, not getting enough money to put your kids through school. Or starving to death. The quest for material security has long since surpassed spiritual compulsions. In the Middle Ages, which none of us have experienced, people were not afraid of losing their jobs - they were afraid of God. Nobody is afraid of God anymore, not even Bible-punching good guys. I want to believe, why not? But I cannot imagine being afraid of God in the process... Will I be forgiven by St. Peter? Will Buddha smile down and bless me, despite my benighted calm? Should I hope so? I can't even conceive of these ideas seriously...

As I've hinted, the self has swallowed the soul perhaps, and we forget what it was like to be emotionally sensitive to beliefs instead of the coy, snappy everyday "better-wisdom" which we buy and sell to win our certain sensibility for material confidence. Push aside those dangerous feelings and be a man! Like I say, every guy and gal has a couple of big fears we try again and again to overcome; these fears are subsidiary to the basic physical hardship of keeping lungs and heart oscillating autonomously upon a full tummy... Forgive me for speaking of my deeper motivations. If you can permit such a pronounced phrase, my impetus hangs like a sack of rice upon the earlobe of divine pity; and my lower lip, misshapen in the effort to confess everything without giving away my problem... A big fear: that I will forget myself and all my work, and suddenly wake-up uncreative and illiterate - and after all these years of discouragement, wasted effort and self-willed obscurity - the deep confidence I've always enjoyed cultivating will be destroyed. Result: the total disablement of my talent - a neutered imagination, a paralyzed pen - that's what I most fear! Okay, laugh at me.

I'm weak because fascinated by the problems that compel our insecurities. Wrong: I am merely dull because I'm exactly like so many others who have ways and means for avoiding work. The wasting of time conspires with all the "big" peoples' designs for you. But big opinions collude with the small people's opinions, too. Of course, everyone is really small, and great minds are freaks of nature who seldom find a comfortable home on this Earth: nobody who is talented actually claims to be a genius. Nothing tragic happens until the act of lifting a pen to paper is silenced with the feeling it's a ridiculous humiliation to even try; then, the creative paranoiac proclaims that the "society" has silenced him/her out of jealous disregard for true talent... The want for an audience is supposed to be explained by the generally low level of commercial mediocrity that sells easily. The pulpy action novel wins big... The ridiculous humiliation experienced by the failure is deepened, knowing that, throughout all history, only a very few writers were able to produce great literature.

The last point lingers: only you decide what to do... Realize that other people do not really judge you - or at least, if they do - their judgements are hardly important to the work you do. Other people do not decide what you will or will not do with your creativity... You do. That's all. Facing yourself is to defeat numerous cheating schemes, most of them perpetuated by you alone. The strongbox of mind shall be broken open, and the treasure inside awaits your daring touch... Sure it does. Nobody wants you to do it, and surely somebody else will get to be big and live that gratifying life full of other peoples' respect instead of the usual self-pity. Really - nobody has to pity you...

I AM burnt out, and maybe it should be a relief. Now, it doesn't matter what I do or say. Nor does it matter very much how I live or work. I can write nothing, or write excellently. I can write drivel. The beauty of my situation is that absolutely nobody will care! Nobody will care that I'm spoiled and self-conscious, that I wasn't born in the right town with the right parents, etc...

Blessed with obscurity, my secret delight is knowing that my work is startling and clear - full of beautiful metaphors and insights. I'm not even remotely obtuse... But because nobody will read it, how can I help but become careless? That's what you think - because you assume writers must compete, too. But I refuse to enter the fray. It would be just too hard for me to drop the self-consciousness of being a professional; it's one more plague upon the modern imagination, a cheap hypocrisy. After all - how can we pretend that we don't care about being brought up to kill other people for what we pretend to deserve?

I can stop here and write no more, but there's so much to tell you about. I will see and feel deeply in this place. I can tell you of the people I meet, and I will embellish the mountains with my mood. Empty of cities and full of solitude. Hot sand and vivid water. You cannot imagine how trapped you are in your car and lovely, expensive homes...

Age allows me to outgrow impatience. Perspective is one of nature's truest gifts, and each of us should learn to keep it close to the heart for understanding the long span of our more disquieting persuasions. Dispel trouble with an inkling that all eternity lives in each instant.

I suppose, to be fully honest, this anxiety about running out of money really threatens to ruin my talent. Some think that being poor keeps the edge on the blade so to say. Doesn't a difficult actor earn more respect for being desperate and insecure? Weird, how we pay each other to be afraid of this wondrous world! Haven't we made running out of money a good reason to die?

I'm getting a little older: peoples' judgements can still bite sometimes, but usually their prejudices don't touch me... For example, if the Pontius is full of noise and slim knowledge, he may suspect that I know more, but then he imagines himself flustered - but not "fooled" - by my irresponsible, lose-all-my-money actions - since he hasn't the largesse or balls to do the same thing. Don't forget: once you get hold of a lot of money, you will automatically become more careful and won't be allowed to risk anything at all. You will become as rich as the next millionaire - and nothing more. I know that I'm always going to be poor, so I don't have to worry about it much. Perhaps some of my younger judges are dimly aware that they fail to put themselves into my shoes, and can't see themselves doing the same kinds of things later in life, having locked themselves inside the forced-labor camp of a "career." I never had a career - thank God...

You can make something out of the world only if you really believe that you need to make some changes. Yet so many of our theories and political ideologies - they are so often made of plain avowals, testaments and claims to believe in one narrow way of doing things. Example: what lies behind my silly belly button but a faith that I'm a writer, and not merely by choice - but by birth! Promising to try again is the universal refrain of all failures. It's too easy to do nothing but mock and be mocked - half-wit and genius alike.

My claim to be a writer evokes indifference, or the eyebrow imperceptibly lifted. Occasionally someone admires the idea. Still, I don't talk about being a writer. Sometimes I imagine that I emit a mysterious allure over which I have no control. But that is a dream deep inside the imagination of women who don't know me, and has nothing to do with my supernatural talent, which isn't always apparent as I live day to day. I guess I don't often give myself the chance to perform. My talents aren't open to public purview anyway: they are deeply at home in my consciousness and aren't often shared... So let's hope that a woman with imagination can make up for a man's shortcomings.

The imagination of twenty-three years was so much more capacious in the scope of its illusions, especially in the sense that its blind spots were whole globes of shattering consciousness, when each experience was too soon taken as universal. Time must pass and perspective grows up by itself. If you're smart, the globes of blindness recede into moles, barely noticed under the stubble of your five o'clock shadow. The most interesting phases of growth help free up new questions from the ice jam: truly, the world is a womb for the imagination and its birth is a process of years. If you are fortunate, the sense of unique experience due to privileges of birth, education and economic class tend to retreat as we see that each one suffers being alone... Truly, it's a step towards our illusion of maturity, realizing that we actually live in the same world as everyone else; but we see that our perspectives are wholly personal. Maybe only joy and agony are identical between individuals. ...You realize that you're small and everybody suffers delusions and wishes to be loved as much and even more than you. The world isn't only a trap for you, it traps us all among daunting dilemmas. How can I be understood? What's the point of doing a job if it takes me away from my joys and talents?

The assumption of human equality as a common goal - towards the ends of health, prosperity and the exercise of rights - is a noble wish, but one which has never been understood very well... Many hardcore chumps who end up being labeled "right-wing," tend to hold out against this assumption of human equality because they consider themselves very wise, and believe that they can't fail to see how unequal we are born, achieving no more and no less than our innate level of natural intelligence allows. What these mean ones fail to acknowledge is that the idea of human equality involves our external rights and the exercise of privileges on social levels only... We really ought to emphasize that human beings are always members of the same community first, and that we are all equal at the conceptual level - before the divine mind's eye; only within this belief are we likely to make progress towards realizing the good life...

Too often we give up the attempt to win arguments involving what we perceive to be a gross misunderstanding upon the part of our opponents...