Movement. But travel in Tibet isn't so easy. You may get going, but that's small reason to assume you'll keep going. Our first problem is a huge pile of shit by the road: road-building sand, good for nothing, but our driver wants weight in back of his johnny. Maybe he thinks someone will want to buy it later... I don't know, I don't care. So, the driver picks up a few Tibetans from a depot a few kilometres away and drives back to the pile of shit. Then Miguel and I help the Tibetan slaves shovel it! It's grey - horrible, wet clay... The rain starts again and the mean Chinese truck driver forces the poor, chilled and soaking wet Tibetans to keep working. He doesn't care about anything! Three hours later, we drive the cold slaves back to the depot and leave.

The drivers chain-smoke and intend to drive all night. We climb a high pass. At 11:00 P.M. we're blocked by a stuck truck near the mountain-top. It's freezing up here! We light a candle, eat some biscuits and that's dinner. Our drivers munch on apples and drink cola. We sit up and sleep on our knees. My journal captures it:

"Such an everyday occurrence, that the fellows driving our own truck displayed no surprise or agitation. The night cold gripped our limbs... The driver was immediately asleep, but he kept making strangely loud, ahhhing noises with his every breath. Mo-guay Miguel was pretty irritated by this racket and kept whacking at the insensible guy every so often."

By the time daybreak comes, several trucks are lined up behind. Fifteen trucks wait for the stuck men to act. 300 years later, a lengthy process will commence: first, the truckers unload all the goods from the stuck truck. Then they use another truck to pull. We waited six hours - I'd rather be on my bike! We've driven 130 kilometres in 24 hours, averaging a whopping 5 kilometres an hour. I never want to ride in a truck again! Soon, we find ourselves behind a land cruiser deeply sunk in the mud. We're good Samaritans and try to pull him out with a rope, but we only snap off his hitch, like trying to pull an elephant's tooth with a pair of tweezers.

Creeping behind another convoy, we wait to traverse a muddy stretch beside a river. I wash and shave. Some truckers come to collect 10 yuan for paying the rope-pullers. A hundred trucks and more wait on both sides of the muck. We wait a few hours for our turn, but not without getting mired. I join the rope-pullers to make tug of war.

Then we wait behind another truck, his drive shaft broken. At last he changes his trans-axle. It's a lovely long stretch into a spectacular valley of most unearthly natural beauty embedded between golden peaks. A most magnificent rainbow blossoms overhead. Beyond lies Samsang village.

We arrive and the drivers let us off at a Chinese restaurant. The spinach and Sichuan fried pork comes. At last, a feast. We eat and observe a table full of Chinese soldiers chatting next us. They're full of unintelligible gossip. Miguel and I talk over the Dalai Lama, about the fact he's still living in India and can't come home. I suggest maybe it's his own fault: if a leader is born to lead his people, he ought to do it at home. Miguel has no particular opinion. Of course, it's impossible for the Dalai Lama to go home. But all this waiting for China to grow up is futile. The Chinese will wank empire for some time yet, and the Dalai Lama fears persecution... Everyone knows how many innocent local people have landed in Tibetan jails for crimes as great as watching videos of the Dalai Lama.

Someone told me that the Dalai Lama has said that there won't be anymore reincarnations of himself after he's gone. Maybe the Dalai Lama pities himself too much. Maybe he doesn't feel like a Dalai Lama anymore. Maybe he doesn't want to appear naive - I don't know. Well, the truth is, as long ago as 1969, he offered to stand down as official leader of Tibet if a free democracy could be established in Tibet. I won't pretend to understand the oriental mentality, and I never will. But change - both forced and natural - comes to all societies. The problem of Asia seems to be intransigence, a great gulf between rich and poor - and ongoing habits of repressive corruption and double standards. Chinese women are especially passive and unimaginative: everyone of them has a dream as predictably identical as the next... You gotta want babies if you want a blow job, boys. And if you want to pick up the bar/disco girl, you have to a pot-bellied American businessman with bucks, or a young gun who's so tough and insensitive that only a mean cunt would want to sleep with him anyway! Believe me - it is much easier to get laid in Thailand boys - if you aren't afraid of contracting AIDS, I guess; so, don't waste your time with the babes of Taiwan - they're already too programmed... Very little gets past the requirements of these dull, unquestioned social extremes... Prerequisite roles - yes. Much inflexible political noise - yes. Patriarchal economic dominance - yes. People haven't a clue what living freely might be. The great thing about Taiwan - perhaps because of the rigid social stratification - is the wonderful new prosperity: nobody is starving, everyone has a home, a bike, a car - but nobody's going for a walk on the beach, either. It's so crowded - people just need more space to bloom. In fact, I've concluded that a lot of Asians prefer to be prisoners, since it's easier than acting, doing and thinking for yourself... There are so many instances of how the ruling class offers little respect for the concept of freedom and equality. It's okay for the rich old man to have three wives and two mistresses, but not the middle class sucker; he has to be faithful - or wait for a divorce. Every time they pass a labor law in Taiwan it makes no sense at all. Last year the few rich men and women of Taiwan - those privileged bums who get to be government representatives - they passed a labor law stating that everyone would be entitled to Saturday off, but only if you had a government job; the law is in no way binding upon the entire spectrum of workers in society because it allows for a clause to let individual companies decide whether or not to give their people Saturday off. All of this futile, weak law-making amounts to so much window-dressing - to make Taiwan appear as if it were progressive. But the ruling class is most of all concerned with making itself comfortable first. In Taiwan, government representatives earn at least 7 times as much salary as do parliamentarians in Canada. Judging by the actual divisions of wealth and labor across Asia - and how they are maintained by might, right and theft - everyone seems taught to fear freedom and condemn social equality. Of course, some will argue the chaotic organization of the social estate permits some measure of freedom, if you are willing to work illegally - under the table... Maybe you can do that in Canada as well. The Chinese are more industrious than most North Americans. But perhaps they work hard out of fear and not really greed at all... Anyway, it's quite difficult to find anyone in a Taiwan company who dares hold any opinion different from their big boss. Thought lags behind authority.

As we finish eating, the waitress lets us know the sum total of our dinner, and it's twice what Miguel expected it to be. We must pay. I was hungry. It was really fresh food. I want to get out of here! But Miguel refuses to believe and wants to bicker over the price. This blows my fuse and it's comical. Miguel really is the cheapest guy in the universe, and he's silently proud of it. I know the going rate for fried pork is 15 or 20, not five or ten. So, I get angry and tell him not to be such a cheap bastard and pay up. Finally, he coughs up the extra cash. But it feels like he did this so he could enjoy being able to make me get mad...

We find the drivers at a Tibetan roadhouse. I go for a walk around Samsang. Obviously, it was once a Nomad camp and then somebody decided to throw up a few houses until a street evolved. Everything is spaced out: there are only a couple of stores. The biggest and newest public building is all shut up. The Tibetans here look itinerant and very poor, and they have an idle way of wandering the streets, doing nothing.

I walk on and see one of the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. There are two women together - both wearing tribal garb. I return their coy but bold smiles... It's too dusky now to take a photo. What's her name, and where does she live? She's at least eighteen. Then bye-bye and I buy some sweets. The old store-keeper grins. In another shop, I find some cookies and army ration biscuits. The Tibetan people seem seriously sad, and yet, hopeful. They can grin at their predicament sometimes. They most of them have some food to eat. Yet, what a protracted sorrow! How silently they endure solitude. How they must conceal their secret feelings of oppression.

Being here among these people - it feels like I'll never be able to keep a promise ever again... To confute our real with our declared aims - that's the last failing and frustration of civilized man! Ah, but no more thought - it's time to go, to forget... We drive past the night and find an empty hotel.

I'm not cynical in daily life. I don't complain or criticize people just because my old man did. All right - that's a lie. When I do feel sorry for myself, I become horribly judgmental, even avariciously so... Actually, now I'm almost slow enough to behave like a gentle and caring person, when I'm not lost in a daze...

Once, I was walking in Peitou, Taiwan. A car whizzed past a scooter and struck the man riding it. He slid across the pavement on his ass. I was walking by, so I ran over to see if was okay. Nobody else did... Cars swerved right round the poor guy without stopping and they didn't slow down - not even a little! All the bystanders stuck to their sidewalks. For me, it was quite a natural emotion to run out and help, to feel for that pain. So, I knelt down, trying to comfort the poor guy. Compassion is easy enough. Everybody else nearby just stood and stared: the old men on the sidewalk looked as dumb as donkeys. The poor guy only needed someone to tell him that he'd be okay...

We only lose compassion, and conscience is liable to grow faint, the longer we do time and suffer the routine. Usually we dwell in a feeling of unimportant obscurity, that evil careless feeling that lulls us to sleep because we pretend it doesn't matter what we do, since after all, we assume things are bound to remain the same anyway. We like to imagine that life puts us in our place too often, or we imagine that it does, because we need to feel sorry for ourselves and make excuses. Belief in talent may be a good motive, but only if you really have talent...

...It's obvious that you must act before you can achieve a refreshed mentality. The conscience that is "supposed" to be imbued within us is also believed to arise from a higher moral dimension derived from experience and the accumulated wisdom of ageless sages. Many Western philosophers have concluded that conscience is realized like a natural fact; it's supposed to be like a pre-existing ratio that imbues reality with truths to which we are all sensitive. According to this world view, we're prone to be inspired with moral wisdom. We are subject to enlightenment if we make our spirit available, isn't that correct? Conscience really is the first thing we need to achieve a self-satisfied, civilized air. In recent times, it's the fashion to critique morality as mere custom and dogma. Yet, the philosophers who said such things only did so in the hope that they might reactivate a chance to think for themselves - and so understand how genuine moral "truths" were inspired - as if they feared the vacuum...

Today, I feel like performing an autopsy on consciousness. First observe: we live without conscience. Yet, for many good reasons! We have excellent excuses for everything wrong that we do, whether by accident or design. Why? Because we believe we can do no wrong. It is in the nature of the human ratio that we must believe in ourselves no matter what we do. With a view to better ourselves, we always downplay questions about the effects of our personal actions on other people. (This kind of reasoning explains the great success of military and mercantile culture, which excuses wrongs with ratios so simple as appetite, order, control, growth - ends unto themselves; a corporate or military entity is able to depersonalize the consequences of its action: truly - a narrow obsession for gain and power may entirely displace the moral faculty.)

In our time, the evasion of guilt becomes a sign of the highest sophistication and has long been preached by the most respectable of psychiatrists. We have earned our freedom - so why let the past overwhelm us with "outdated" precepts? We're such tricky people! We know how to keep ahead of ourselves. We know how to forbid critical reasoning, too... What's left over? Pretence to care. Adherence to hypocritical social critiques (you own an SUV but you are concerned about global warming, etc). The underlying disquiet of our better wisdom produces cynical skepticism: really, all we need are a few suave euphemisms, and we're free...

Well, we certainly do pay each other generously not to ask, much less try to answer, big questions. Comfortable solutions are sought and we deny all possibility of self-delusion. Evasion of identity is now equivalent to omission of responsibility... Why claim a universal theory? We only make moments of life into art, but whether we believe it or not, history informs our competence for new ideas. The human estate is hardly transcendent. A human being is an instant in a vast stream, and this reveals the most natural and beautiful paradox of civilization: even as new insights become possible, people remain dissatisfied with the flood of new knowledge! Like, there aren't as many genes as was expected in the human genome...

So we play a devious role, pitting wit against accomplishment in an effort to explain the incongruities and disparities between what we know now, with what we did not know before... At the same time, we wish to anticipate the future, and make great aspirations from the present state. But human civilization is confused by its many advances and gross inequalities: while we create scientific and technical wonders, witness the strange and unjust gulf between the rich and poor nations. The inexplicable conflicts between creed, politics and color go on. If progress comes - only for a few of us - can it really be called progress? I don't think you know...

But I know we possess too many questions and too few answers: we, who love to wring our wits for nuggets, and then squeeze out a few farts that we can call poetry. Cleverness outwits genius today! Word-spinning outruns thought... Why do we need to cultivate such an overwrought culture? We get almost nowhere with critical abstraction. Our analogies trail blind dogs, and favor the union of imagination with expertise. Suddenly, a squalid market paradigm overrides all content. We should have done better than to end up chasing such misbegotten wishes.

We still think wisdom should be a magic gift. Once again, we wish for an inspiration that comes from outside: the divine mover and cause of life and mind! But it's a hard-won knowledge that beckons after more heart than it can find. We wish we could come at the world from within wisdom; and this wisdom, we have believed, always must come from within our heart. Religion has connected heart to heaven with wishes, with faith. But philosophers have always been very unhappy with this wishfulness, and thinkers have always wanted to create a brand new end for our age-old genesis... Lately, god is taken for the same thing as human imagination.

Today, we continue to make much sophistication from seeing through those who want to know better. Refusing to believe that the accusations of your conscience have substantial meaning helps us to dismiss and forget their original truth. Pretending our qualms are falsehoods, so we need to know ourselves "better than" anyone who might pretend to know us. Human pride is wide and the well of our suffering must be filled to the brim with hope. Our time is made of lies - perhaps because we still need to believe in preserving the sanity of our higher aims. Leaky wisdom is embarrassing: we stop up the cracks and trim them nicely with fresh plaster and grease paint. The model is courage, but the action is denial. The consequences are blindness and wishful thinking.

I encourage you to do what you want. But don't be surprised when people laugh at you, or despise you utterly for being yourself... For we are afraid to be ourselves - in the simple honesty of knowing ourselves, as during youthful moments of inspiration. To speak what you feel is to endure the reproaches of everyone who has been weaned on pragmatic pretences to honesty. We are full of silent panic, that inhibited wish for truth, yet still - we don't have words for it... If we've never known what truth is, how can we begin telling it?

Ah, we're so complicated today, and we don't want to be! We crave easy explanations for every dream! So, we plan a better world. But the world isn't better yet. It's still dying. But certainly, we're going to save it: isn't that the especially human destiny!? You have to believe that life is as miraculous as it feels! Pardon my sarcasm and serpentine ways... I'm trying to show you to yourself - brother, sister... You there, you hide behind the truth - as if your truth would know you too well!

Maybe we know each other - that must be it! We know each other better than ever. We see through everything... It's a gift. I'm your master - but you're already mine, too. The new corporate soul is bandied about faster than we can mint new fetuses... Our collective destiny may become more than simply a philosopher's longing to understand history...

"Win your freedom, with us!" Their trademark, your trademark, is already registered. Knowing it all means knowing each other, brother! That's the fate of civilization after prehistory: a vast illumination of shared self-awareness... Has anything changed here? When did we first start realizing that little Johnny was born to be a painter, a poet, a shoe salesman, or a video star? People are still killing each other for nothing... It's almost the end again. There's no money left in war, especially after everyone gets killed...

The real world begs us to staunch the flow of blood... Who would actually be crazy enough to claim that we know what we're doing? A big step has to be taken! List your passions and crimes: can you still discover any dreams among your mistakes? The grey clay of indifference clings to our souls. We are benumbed with a plague of diverting obsessions. We refuse to think and resist all sensible critiques. Mired in the shell-shockville of man-made crisis after crisis - we're out of answers. So, we deliberately forget how to care.

Self-protection does booming business these days... Mount your cameras. Buckle up the turrets on your old mill stream. It's an inevitable stage for all of us - isn't it? We need to believe in ourselves most as we see through everything all the time... We cannot refine our social effort any further beyond this entrenched self-consciousness: we know ourselves as we know each other and so, we hide nothing. We talk about our problems and fantasies: we realize them, too. Unafraid of each other, we're free to play...

As for those whom we don't know so well, we can settle for calling one another names, boorishly confident. But in the end, we know very little about those whom we judge and judge again. Costly is ignorance.