~ Invisible among the city-dwellers. The folk of Lhasa always know how to look humble - more dispossessed: they know you were liable to end up feeling responsible. Yet it's okay - we were so unable to help them... Wise people grow up to expect little... But maybe nobody is wise any more.

I buy some white chocolate from India, hard to get, but they do import it! Riding my bike along Dekyi Lam, I see somebody with a chrome mountain bike. He also spots me, and waits to intercept my conversation, an aging American. His smirky gaze fractures mine with a certain awareness. So I stop.

"Hi, what's your name?"
"Hutch."
"That's a nice bike you've got!"

So we meet for breakfast the next morning. We talk and talk. Hutch is a living verb, a fragment eager to tell you everything he knows about life. Not your everyday unoccupied chair, he's all ideas. Each of his inklings chases out the next. He's non-stop, rolling around in his head. You could say he's a man made of infatuations. He loves vitality and has risen above weighty care...

Hutch is made of a million unfulfilled dreams. He percolates everyday sensations through his wishes. It's a pleasant surprise to meet a man nearly sixty who hasn't given up on human goodness. That's one of his most admirable traits, and one prolific among the more lovable Americans, a sincere optimism. Okay, maybe the best anybody can do now is a light-hearted pessimism - but he has a really positive mindset quite foreign to the imagination of Canadians, Europeans - and most others who are too sure about the shortcomings of everyone except themselves... If something collapses, Hutch remains unfazed and walks in the other direction. He has a natural way of getting around the frustrations that stop the rest of us. He seems untouched by the kind of annoyances that get us angry, only to make others laugh at us.

Now that I stop and think, I really much prefer writing about individual human beings. It's easier, more true to life to reach for universal human traits through the individual example. Making vague and probably misleading interpretations about the social milieu is one of my many weaknesses; yet, I think this need to over-generalize compensates for that wish to know everything - my childhood longing.

Hutch appears to defy all the worst congenital cultural defects that America usually bequeaths to its dandies. Hutch seems opposed to the trademark American sophomoric intellectualism and blind bluster. He isn't too aggressive and remembers more names and everything that's happened to him. He swims through experience, eats up the action: he has to replenish those muscles, that reservoir of pure energy. He's an American who wonders to himself if he's lost. But he can't lose too much sleep worrying over it. Nobody could tell him to get in line but a traffic policeman! He's comfortably adrift, exactly the sort of man whom nobody needs to know back home. Probably, he could never get anywhere, except on a bike. He doesn't much mind that other people will look askance at him, with the usual cruel, stupid and class-induced superiority that assumes wisdom is inspired by the dull, hollow certainty that all civilized life is based on planned acquisition (ie.: professional education) as well as the pre-established mechanisms of social security.

Like almost all of us, Hutch has tried, so many times, just to be himself. He managed to work enough to save some small escape money. This guy enjoys reading you and responds in kind. Hutch would never step on your toes. Not that I'm not civil, but Hutch is with you because he loves being alive. He sees the wonders and relishes them. He spent a lot of time with a camera, flying in a helicopter over the jungles of Vietnam... But he doesn't mention that now.

I feel comfortable asking questions and we talk about everything. It's the tone of voice, the wandering life, the past places are still present in him. His character is mellow and mild - as if made of ongoing reflections. I admire a man who can relax and speak. He's very verbal, a modern flow - a natural orator full of sharp anecdotes and opinions.

Hutch honestly made me feel good, that's all. He was pleasant and open - ready to assume good things about the world. Still, he's difficult to write about, since he doesn't have a great heap of diverting success behind which he can hide the less savory aspects of his character... But he wouldn't show any nastiness, since he already knows better. He wants to be good, that's all. Mild, deferential...

Do you know anything? Think about how many fine writers were actually mean jerks. It's true, believe me - I know what they're like... Hutch could never admit to being like that, so he pretends to be kind and nice. It's too hard to explain, so forget it. Americans are never ever at home while away from home. Remember - appearances are reality - for your public! Put it this way, if he once was mean, he isn't anymore. With me, he's innocence, a most gentlemanly hobo. He wouldn't fight anyone, ever. Lies aren't necessary for him, either. That would make some people call him stupid, I suppose. He's got that bird stature like so many cyclists and most of his hair has begun to snow. He doesn't have to be the second coming or anything: content to be only himself, he won't be a trial for me.

We meet for breakfast again to talk hooey about bringing in tourists for cycle loops. It's possible. Anything is possible now. Innocent Tibetans go to jail as the tourists pay top dollar to visit exotica. He got tired of living in Nepal, and gave up all hope for his project to start an agri-business... So, like everyone now, he's cynical. The Nepali government is a favorite target. Apparently, the red tape was not geared to individual endeavor. The bureaucracy of development works hard at the mimicry of sunbathing iguanas, stacking up papers high in the process of doing very little. Same thing with bureaucracy back home, only we just get more money to burn under our butts than third-worlders do: in school, corp or government agency - it's the same. I'm a stupid do-nothing, too. Nobody but nobody wants to be the first to take responsibility for making decisions. Everybody above says "no" while everyone below has to say "yes." Welcome to old Asia. ...I deflate my first impression of Hutch's idealism somewhat as he starts harping about Nepal: perhaps he's a bit too glibly stocked with one-liners about knowing better than the locals: you can't get anywhere with the government unless you're an international aid agency with an overflowing purse, etc...

We agree about so many things. Me and Hutch have spent too long away from the homes we needed to forget. The man is Caucasian like me. So, we are both quick to take shelter in cozy, unspoken prejudices about knowing how much the East isn't the same as the West... And then we believe ourselves "less bad" than those selfish Westerners who typically brag about never ever wanting to leave their perfect home in Fatville, Canada or Wasteburg, USA. But I happen to know that they brag like that because they can't become professionals anywhere else. So I don't care either way you go, up or down... Staying close to the main drag is part of accepting your class lot, I guess. They pretend not to feel too confined. I know most of you look down on and even dread the poor. And wanderers like me are stupid freaks... Westerners are happily ignorant of everything outside their necessary preconceptions about how to live the righteous, supposedly good life. Around the world, people are too identical in their persuasions now... Security mechanisms? Nothing but broken locks rotting on the casks of shattered dreams. Oh, it isn't so serious: we only keep each other out! We need to feel smart somehow, I guess. You in your expansive and eager social circle. Me in my quiet hamster cage. You repeat for the EC circuit again, or ride the heavy ticket of America's dreams. Hang on tight. Block busters and big cities. I haven't thought of a good enough pseudonym, either... I keep leaving for good. Can't wait around for old lard to say, "Yes..."

What am I doing here? Waiting for bicycle tools that won't arrive. All I need is a very simple device with a socket on its end, like an ordinary wrench, designed for removing the damned freewheel sprocket. It's the myth of a perfect solution, isn't it? A medicinal herb. Like a poem that explains the prevailing mood of a whole people.

Breakfast is my least lonely meal of the day. Because I can forget my stagnant illusions. I smile at lost time and enjoy the conversation. Hutch shows up late, wearing a yellow and black jacket, looking exactly a cross between fire fighter and ordinary wasp. He has a history, but doesn't speak it. He imagines today is freedom, as if he were still young. He believes he's young. So he is! He doesn't need to live in the past. (I think most old men doddering through this world actually must be dwelling in the past - dreaming of their young wife, or their young chums killed during the last war.) Some people manage never to have any big regrets, and so stay in good shape enough to live a long time.

Our freedom to act began a long time ago, perhaps as a positive evasion of (repressive sexual) morality. Today, we imagine that free action is the highest end because it pretends to satisfy immediate physical fancies and obviously defeats inhibition. We are such hunger-borne, touch-driven beings.

The retreat into a spiritual desire for goodness is a response made from seeing the repeated mastery of all nature and ourselves. Within this conflict of heart, our innermost inviolable self always revolts against the crimes we commit against each other's integrity, innocence and freedom - simply because we have to love someone, and make believe the world works... The human soul longs to grow and be free, even if escaping sorrow and endless slavery is improbable...

Hutch alludes only to some crime he once committed against woman. It's a crime that I perpetrated, too. But not intentionally, not maliciously. I do not behave without scruples. Only crazy mean people hurt others deliberately. Not me. Men like me claim to be artists. We're all just too selfish. We make women love us - but only to steal their youth and time. We men justify our mischief by any ratio that we can muster. For some reason artists expect, almost subconsciously, that a woman "ought to be" self-sacrificing. But none of them are anymore... After all, most artists are just too dirt poor to satisfy today's status-sucking clones... If their "artist" doesn't resemble another middle class clown, working for the same system as everyone else - then he's just a bum - and she won't touch him... What a dead fucking world it has become! But I don't care. I know a thing or two. Women should fuck us because we are attractive, challenging and tempting. Forget what pity once was. If you fuck a man out of pity - you are screwed up good, sister. What about women who are consciously submissive? What's wrong with them? Nothing really, it's just a childish fantasy that needs acting out... Adults forbid free play time and again, so we need to devise outlets. Now, a lot of girls have become too complicated for men. A lot of men still often expect the more out-dated models - the ladies who will let you get away with anything while they keep their stupid mouths shut, or how about those dim-witted ladies who always pretend that they want what you want! I don't fight with women - almost never. If I start to fight with a woman, it's time to say bye-bye! I mean it. Anyway, we should know better by now - how to behave together. Despite women's frothy ploys (like saying they want to work when they'd rather stay at home) and their serial cock-teasery - many ladies really do want the same rights and privileges that men already possess. Well, why not? But most men won't understand that...

When men use women, we give it a euphemistic name, especially because women almost always expect more love than we have to give: men always play up to the feminine expectations... (Sorry, I don't know about your happiness: my frigid deficit isn't universal.) Even so, I still think the rule of social nature - of male over the female - has made men hopelessly selfish and, consequently, has taught women to enjoy and crave "giving in" to us... That's why so many women love to fantasize and read innumerable romances about being taken by the ideal manly lover, especially for the first time... So they can be loved as a man must love them - to hold them, cherish them - keep them safe. It's a true cliche. It feels good to hold your lover woman: then she feels secure, and you both feel tender warmth, and it's love. Whenever it feels like the only real thing you can experience is love, that's love. Most of the rest of the time, now, love is lust...

At breakfast again, Hutch reveals that he studied economics and we slip into some talk about governments... I sketch an older me in this apparition sitting there. He's real enough, even if this isn't literature; it's a memory for dreams.

The funny thing about your first creative efforts is the ease and assurance for getting it on paper. As you get on with life, and realize a few of your many great schemes, you begin to wonder what you really are capable of doing. Not so much as you want to do. It's always the same. Success is a compromise. A job is about all you end up with: the routine genre, the same old reading, the smiling audience... Stolen time can stop you - but that's only an excuse.

People will hate you if you would rather write than work. Maybe because they've already lost their dreams, or didn't have any... The real tragedy is when you wake up without any inspiration - and you recall how easy it was to turn those dewy dawning words into poems when you were a kid... Age often brings on a painful sense of futility if talent should atrophy. So, the "giving up" phenomenon is commonplace: budding authors suddenly realize that they "haven't got it" or can't make a living "at it." In fact, we're taught to give up and take the easy way out...

If people hate you without reason, then they obviously don't know very much about you. If people you don't even know seem to love you, it's only because they imagine you could love them, even if you don't know a thing about them.

Most of the world's best writers began by saying: "If I don't do it, then nobody will!" So we waste all our youth and half our age alone, writing in silent solitude. Yet, social aspirations and greedy motives seem silly beside a writer's ambitions and desperations. Because, a writer can't and won't do anything else. The artist's dream always seems beautiful, but in practice, it's often a miserable mess. What do we really have in common? Nothing but the identities we imagine for each other...

Hutch explains that he hasn't had any luck finding a waiter who knows how to shell an egg properly. Sometimes the waitress here at the Banak Zhol Hotel remembers to do it for him, when she isn't in a hurry. Hutch says that she only did it once, the first time, and only after he asked her politely. Hutch says that in most Tibetan-Chinese restaurants, the waiter's usual response to requests for egg-shelling service is, "I'm sorry sir, I can't do that for you."

Now, it does not strike me as a particularly large issue whether or not the restaurant staff can peel our egg shells for us or not. Hutch is only trying to illustrate his case and point out that we, the tourists, are not very well understood in Lhasa. Good service is an exclusively Western concept. So, the egg always gets peeled in Nepal since the locals have been long inured to Western colonial expectations. Not so in Tibet.

Hutch is still trying to find some way to grasp Lhasa, China/Tibet. He explains that he has met with several local cadres - to find out how he can do business. He's very gregarious and likes to find out how a place works. I appear lazy and lost in myself by comparison. I'm far too shy to be extroverted unless tuned directly to some lusty need. Language comes last. Get in bed quickly, or not at all.

But I feel so thin in the head with genetic, social legacies. I want to release my past. It isn't mine! This burden of responsibility is put on me! My ancestor's misconceptions are no longer my own. We teach that the future is made of liberating discoveries. So, I don't have to lock myself into a weak lyric, a poor caricature for living an unpleasantly cold vein for standing over things. ...But it's such a pain in the ass to figure out how to suck even a little money out of things. Especially when all you're good for is writing difficult stories and poems...

At least I am almost going to become completely free from making the usual old money by exploiting the modern world's bizarre respect for intellectual dishonesty as a means to acquire a salary, however unlike so very many cowardly university professors, corporate hatchet men, neurotic political fanatics and pathetic, yellowy journalists! What do I know? Not enough - obviously...

I stand beside my dreams, my ideas. If I could figure out how to write and to fuck as many sluts as I could before I get too old - I would - I really would! Already I'm feeling too old, and my life is wasted and I can't think of how to escape all this useless waste of energy and time... The depression, the bathetic anti-climax only reverberates - bitterly, idiotically, hilariously - whenever I contemplate the impossibility of making a living as a writer. Even if I did take a couple of months to write a schlocky SM-porn thriller - they wouldn't let me publish that either! I want to write good novels about real life. I want to write fantasies extending the imagination far beyond the everyday myopia that keeps us so certain, so narrow and so insecure! I'm never going to go back: my home is now a past era. Not yet the last of my myth: I'm another of many men born to be forgotten. Because, I really don't care if there's a heaven better than hell! The prophecies are all misunderstood - or plain crazy!

You can count the real poets who doubled as popular singers on the fingers of three murdered whores.

~ This old has-been - Hutch, the soldier-poet - he should be the travel writer, not me! I'm anti-social by creed - because of an inexplicable coincidence of self-limitation put upon myself as I grew up. You don't need my father. You need a campfire to warm up. Poetry laughed at me, then left me behind with a non-descript imagination.

The main thing is, Hutch has found out that it's possible to start an enterprise in China, and you can get permissions if you want them... You must swim through several layers of people in order to grasp that paper... He talks and talks, yet doesn't really intend to do anything. I like that. (Better than making deals only to end up with another bad blood and guts thriller! American cinema is so limited by its production values!) He isn't afraid to fantasize out loud... A coffee shop with books - his idea is great. We all make plans, don't we? But most of us keep them quiet... I want a small guesthouse in the Himalaya, staffed with eager Scandanavian and Czech sweeties...

Another morning comes and we break our fast over talk about Inuit and Amerindians, old girlfriends, camping trips, changing money, whether or not to see Everest, go home, or go to India and write novels for ten years... I'm eating too many pancakes and they're getting smaller everyday.

"Don't stay too long in one place..." But that just hands me a fractured fate. How can I learn to be content? My little girl waits for me at home. She's sad without me. I don't even have to call to find out.

Years ago I realized that I was to be left behind, officially, by laughter, and by the sheer horror of those jealous ones, who could only wonder in small sub-conscious whispers - I'm happy not to be him! Some wished that they could be me... But only a few. They looked at me so seriously at those Montreal parties, conveying their silent wish to be possessed with my "immortal talent." Sure they did... But at the same time, they didn't want to know me - except for the really uncontrollably sluts and dreamy darling poetesses - the rest of the usual staid crew of nay-saying CV flakes and other well-trained nobodies - they don't really want to know anything new at all! They just have to remake some old play they never wrote...

Today, what do we boys get? Just some smarmy cunt yelling at us: "Get a life!" Sure, a few girls said, "I'm proud of you!" or, "I love you." Maybe six girls, like my mother; about two freaky Canadians, a few Chinese babies and a few I don't remember. All women really want is somebody to buy their sucky wucky little pussies.