Pardon me my feeble critique, it's part of the inveterate puerility I inherited from growing up in a spoiled time. I'm like a bad habit that's all - a defensive rampart created to defeat fear of failure and poverty. Yes, yes, I really am one of those stupid, cowardly people who doesn't know what to do! I hate to compete and I must search for my brother among the vilest of cowards and noble hearts both - all the same... Why can't I get small and deflate myself, finally, and for good? At least I'm not the only blimp around...

We invest heavily in our own vanities, and we can't put up with wisdom. I mean, we're on an ego-trip about becoming enlightened. Maybe my whole stance is a vast over-reaction, a psychological compensation for claiming that our culture is mislead, is unconscious. So, I'm only pretending, right?

The nature of modern man was to doubt. Ultra-modern man is involved with illusions of super-well-being. We buy or die for it. We pray for it, too... Today, those of us who play at virility and finesse - we are free of doubt and so subscribe to the opposite kind of over-compensation, which leads to absolutism, greed and intolerance: in short, the unintentional fascism of huge corporations and colonial governments, and provincial little arts councils, righteous religious fanatics, gender nazis, mean school teachers, fake commercial artists - all kinds of dickheads! We're all in it together suckers: the whole professionalism of popular mediocrity is made entirely of dull cliches and platitudes, and nothing except whatever can be easily mass-produced is tolerated, bought, sold, published and read! Ughhhh!

The richer you are - the more you have to cough up to consume the fantasy... All salesmen impel the average you and me to buy the fantasy, too. What am I talking about? Forget it, I can't earn any respect. Because you think I don't respect anybody else. Not at all, I'm only agitated by the idiotic limitations people impose on themselves, especially when we could do so much more with imagination than exclude everything but the appropriately pre-formed. Do you have any choice? Weaned on tv and slick zines... If you want to be a somebody, if you want to rake in the royalties - you absolutely must sell through the Big Corp today. You have no choice but to tailor your style to exactly fit the desires of all the image-ready consumers, eager to buy themselves over and over again... Go ahead, buy the bland-banal, the palsy-plastic top 40. It's easily baked! Popstars: suck on that Corp for all you're worth. I'm hanging on, too... A small monkey. Kill me, I don't care. Because now it all comes down to some pathetic Pharisees grovelling for bureaucratic approval - from a corporation or a government council - same thing! The preference is for pseudo-intellectual rubbish in place of pure imagination... Got caught with lucre-on-the-brain? So what! Everyone has the bug anyway. Why, I'd sell dope if I knew I wouldn't get caught! Today, if you are glib, brashly intolerant and deliberately low brow, the rich will be happy to give you money because you won't make any trouble: just think how we're all paid to keep things the same and tame, not for thinking about how to make the world a better place! Just shut up and slave! The less you know, the more work you can do for the rich man! People will hate you if you aren't as selfish and vain as they are. But if you are very good and original, or question the order of society and really are too thoughtful, then you will have to wait a long time to become "popularized." Just remember: if you are not dead, you soon will be, and that makes the stupid bullies with power feel very smug about stealing your time. Let the glib winners pass their intolerance off as sophistication and their cleverness as "genius." If it isn't easy, it's ignored. People want to kill the fine artist today and replace him with average mass-products that make quick money easily. Manques and mannequins: don't have to fathom nothing but nothing's more important than laying another and another and another! We're airheads! The whole world's become a fire sale on dummy udders and filthy asps...

Can I afford the right system attitude or not? Gee, I don't know. That's all that matters now - having the "right" attitude. Brrrr! But what a sterile world, this ultramodern fantasy of freedom in lieu of the real you! Why are you so easily led? I'm not! To hell with all the shit of the world, again and again! We're all as empty as we want to be - wannabe! God help us all... But fat chance. Yeah, so fuck you God! For stressing us out leaving us on the hook forever, making us kill each other for nothing... We shall never cease being children: I haven't even told you about the abortion my girl had last spring - and I'm not going to...

Do you care about anything but what your audience-filled stomach tells you is level-headed and appropriate enough? Your head's full of mush - but it doesn't matter! Innocence is always the beginning of the free imagination that we grow up to crush and forget later in life. We're taught to accept ready-made goals in place of dreams. Life made uniform seems easier: it feels more secure. If the family is a natural destiny, then material waste isn't... You don't follow me? Good. Nothing makes sense.

Imagination is supposed to be fueled by experience, and the sheer inspiration of making a discovery. But I'll never know what I'm talking about - since I can never ever get enough experience! Still, we feel as if the fate of words remain warm: the language of insight is tucked cozily in bed with your blood. Wisdom is a hapless pup thrown into life. It's a world that pup would love to change, but she does little more than sniff up some scraps for breakfast. To buy you a lunch, darling - I have to save up.

Our best wishes appear to reflect wisdom. Yet these same wise wishes appear improbable; so who would want to call human desire wise? Inspired by knowledge, we should define true wisdom by our best action. Wisdom would give solutions to problems that have no solution. Again, are we capable of dealing with paradoxes? Can we finally avoid and transcend our dilemamas and fathers with more precise portrayal and analysis? One would hope so.

Can't remember what we said, except we fell asleep on our own words. At three A.M. I go out for a pee. The place across the street is still very busy with drunken songsters. ...Had a dream last night. Was speaking in front of colleagues, philosophers, poets... I could feel their respect, which was like a new experience, and felt as one who has never before ever understood what other people really think about you! The dream helped me escape the vain embarrassment that I suffer everyday - about not being allowed to be successful as a writer... (And it doesn't comfort me to realize that most of today's "successful" writers produce only second-rate crap: that's depressing. The current situation demands all the more that someone come up with great literature - exactly now - when it's impossible to create it!) In the dream, I had written an expressive poem, but couldn't wake up in time to remember it with paper. My literary colleagues faded and everything disappeared. I was reaching after some understanding about how I became estranged from my birth, which seemed to be somebody's fault, but not mine; then, I realized the alienation I'd created was unreal, like an escape, a protective membrane that I used to shield ignorance, insecurity and faults... Condoms anyone? I realized that I never learned how to fight for what I could do... Maybe I could've produced my plays and begged after publishers. But why didn't I? What stopped me? I suppose it seemed too ignominious a prospect. It seemed that the art spoke for itself, and the idea of promotion and self-selling contradicted the work itself! And, I guess I was just tired of working poor and being insulted by all the no-talent artsy bullies. I got sick of watching those women leaving me alone. I felt cut off, discarded. Yeah, I still had a few friends - good ones - and they loved me... But no chance for a publisher or anything normal, nothing so easy as so many other writers have their way for buying free time from corporation, government and school...

I wake up early and write long letters. I plan to make a phone call - but later. I hate telephones - you can't see the person. Outside they shovel extra dirt from the unfinished traffic circle into the back of a gravel truck. Around ten o'clock A.M. Carl walks in. He's a cyclist, and has come from Lhasa, all the way across Southeast Asia and Australia. He's Canadian like me - from New Brunswick. Carl can't stop blabbing, either. His good mood makes us smile.

Paul is silent as I question our new companion. Carl reels through anecdotes like he remembers everything that's ever happened to him; he could be talking to mannequins for all the attention he pays us. He's a perpetual traveler, cycling since 1980 around the world between brief work breaks to save money. He has no worries. He's ridden round the world, except Africa. He loves India the most. Once, he rode from Inuvik at the Arctic Circle all the way to the tip of South America in Patagonia. He's friendly and attaches himself to us with the familiarity of an old pal. I'm amused by the symptoms of long-term solo travel which he exhibits. Cyclists all turn banana after awhile. Inadvertent withdrawal from society makes us clamor for an ear.

Carl doesn't notice that he's the only one talking: he pushed his bike through a lot of sand; he likes the scenery and people of Tibet. About Chinese society, he theorizes optimistically, that the rule of fear is gradually giving way to the rule of law. He cites several bits of evidence: people are unafraid to speak up, an ombudsman tv program, a burgeoning urban economy... But Carl also witnessed a public execution beside the road - bang, right in the head - a crowd of peasants looking on. Seeing that almost got him deported from China. He's had more trouble with wood-ticks than I ever will. Climbing the lip of a volcano in Guatemala was wonderful, and there was that big black girl he couldn't bring himself to pop in Belize.

Carl talks shop about bikes, cameras, food - anything. Conversation takes us to a restaurant at noon. We eat our fill and meet another foreigner, an Australian on his way to England to pick-up a job as a lawyer. They talk about Australia. I've never been there and don't want to go there - I think they speak English already - and I know there are too many yobos - all of them as dull as any of the spicy trolls you can find in Redneckville, Canada. I've only met two Australians I liked, and one was from Tasmania and lived in Ireland, and the other one, well, I don't know what he wants, always fighting with his girl. (When are we going to grow up and to be sluts, finally after all?) Anyway, Carl says his favorite writer is Tolstoy. He can't stop talking. If he's mad, it's a good kind of madness. Like me, he's addicted to motion, which, like poverty, isn't a crime we perpetrate on purpose.

Carl is a fine example of one who lives without planning the details. I'm bored with the other, more conventional draftsmen; because, when you pause for thought, who needs to know the precise course of life ten, fifteen and twenty years later? Isn't that dull? I want to write another novel, but I don't know exactly how to manage it. Living ought to preserve some measure of unpredictability if it's to remain interesting. I see life as ever-changing consciousness. Life is spontaneous, and so is creativity. Plans are for old bureaucrats and sneaky cowards. True artists are bigger than the poor cash systems which so demean us... What makes it really interesting? Ask yourself. Getting what you want? Sometimes, but that's only if you want something. I want to write and make love. I have no plan. I have little fear, except for producing children who must endure their parent's divorce. (All children of divorced parents become selfish fuck-ups - period - and I don't care what you think of my opinion, snothead.) Carl naps after his meal, so I go shopping for more food to carry on to Tsamda. Dried meat, noodle soup, some fruit, some other goodies. I'm happy. This second day of rest is a day to relax muscles, ease past exhaustion and recover normal energy. Nothing to do but eat, realizing how deadly thin we're becoming.

Not far from PLA headquarters is the deluxe, marbly and new administrative office of China Telecom - in case those poor Tibetan guys with shovels have to pay their overdue phone bills - yeah. But why can't you place a call in this expensive new phone office? Why don't they have any phones in there? What's it for? I guess - for administering to the skinny four wire circuit running from Kashgar on to Lhasa? Maybe I can't see the dishes on the roof sending and receiving the more substantial secret spy signals. The pretty ladies in the new Telecom office lounge in front of idle computer screens waiting for people who never ever enter their polished office. Am I missing a hint or something, kiddies? What next? I go back again to the grubby old bank that doubles as the post office across from the hotel. It's about 1/5 the size of the empty new and big phone bureau. Chinese pork is Chinese pork. In back of this ugly, cramped little building is a dim-lit anteroom full of ancient phone boxes: I try to talk over the fax machine, but my girl isn't home. Tibetans crowd the single wicket and beg for a payphone. The one and only Tibetan lady managing all the phones smiles at me, despite being harried and overworked... The crew of Tibetan dudes and homesick Chinese soldiers follow me with hungry eyes as I leave them to their dingy fate.

A wanton stitch in time stretches taut. Waiting for evolution to happen doesn't get us very far. The great leap of consciousness involves a world most people will never get much chance to visit... Like that marbly phone office with no phones that nobody enters. Come on, people are smarter than that, right? But people with nothing - they don't know what to do next! How can you hold it against them? The poor of this world haven't anything to start with! You have to get some scratch, some capital: but it takes much more to fuel the hope of the poor than the small change of an empty, go-nowhere socialism, it takes much more than the overbearing, one-way street of the dumbly unfair Western business world, . But all this interpretation an cynical opinion is an illusion, too. Substantial direction and know-how: everybody needs them if anything good is to happen... If ever there was a god, it would have had a great problem dealing with us. Too many people are good and evil at the same time, and we never have questions enough to answer for the clues we're given by god...

It's late, trying to remember how to rest. Paul, Carl and I mosey over for some skewered mutton at the Uigur restaurant. The restaurant is one of the nicest in town. The Uigurs, like I say, really know how to use coriander and cumin. The Hindustani tea is good, too. We listen to Carl's tales. He's begun asking us questions, too. The evening comes on, cool and soporific. The invitation is open: we cannot refuse life. We want to talk, so we do. Carl remembers everything he's ever done. But he'll forget us - so he says. He still doesn't stop his chattering. The man is overloaded: his bicycle bags are twice the size of mine. Yet, he claims the panniers are designed for a tandem bike. No idea how he does it! Carl carries a jumbo 70-210mm Nikon lens. It has a 2.8 f-stop aperture and weighs a good five kilos at least... "All glass," says Carl. I show him my compact Nikon lens, of identical zoom range, with a little less light gathering power, and maybe weighing in at 400 grams, tops. It cost me about 150 dollars and can take exactly the same pictures as Carl's multi-thousand dollar lens. (I have a theory about camera equipment, but I'll spare you...) Carl has a dandy white-gas stove: wish I had one! I eat my noodles cold! I have so little compared to his massive supply of gear and powder puddings! He isn't losing weight and I am.