82

Sanctuary.

It stares up at me as the green glow of terror, of disappointment, of striving for all the optimism and idealism inside me, gleans its way across the glass. It cries to me. It screams for reasons why I insult it by sumbitting it to future in such a torturous, humiliating act. In an instant, words are replicated imperfectly. Colors of pens borrowed from the world's teahouses and passers by turn blackish shades of gray, and pages of personality blend to flat, dull, 2 dimensional crimson - nope, too alive. Black. Just black.

I almost can't bring myself to do it. I almost can't lay the journals down on polished glass in sterilized national-chains entirely dedicated to boring, rapid reproduction in a country where printing presses or, god-forbid, the pen has been replaced by that green sasquatch killing creativity and bolstering it all the same. As Jay said, "here you can let machines do things, so you can focus on other things." And yet part of it is lost. Part of the illusion of the unique as pages I suffered through sweltering Burmese heat, wiping sweat from pupils, appear as normal and unassuming as the mass-produced million-copies-sold perfection of straight lines and identical m's. We stare forward, moving only to avert our eyes from the blazing green lite saber threatening to shred our retina as it swipes past, and to change pages to replicate a moment of our lives - or of someone else's - anew every second or so. It hurts, and the questions begin anew. Why am I writing this? What am I creating?

Should not all that I learned teach nothing if not to swing the words I've penned into a drawer of my own life, and softly lock them down in my own being? Why replicate them to a world that will inevitably and inadvertently morph their meaning more than even I with my new eyes of experience?

As I write this book, it must be for me. Only for me. Perhaps that's a brutal fact worthy of quiet, calm acceptance.

So I thump my opposable digit down on that big green start button (green as though foreshadowing the terror of the light saber to come) 700 painful times as I ached for inner calm of acceptance. And it came, as page 400 or so swung its way into the heart of the machine and jammed. No, not only jammed, but destroyed. Condemned the whole operation to another day. "Error. Reboot machine." Perhaps the machine felt my unease. Perhaps it felt a similar pain at easy, trivializing reproduction as it swept out page after page of hot, bitter, exciting, bland, descriptive, demoralizing, and uplifting words. Perhaps it was all too much.

Whatever it was, thank Jesus, Shiva, Buddha, Pachamama, and Quetzalcoatl. It was all too much to create, or destroy, in a day. And now I have an excuse to reflect, and return. To take one more step before burying myself in committment. A step that would have been unnecessary without such gracious mechanical empathy.

In the meantime, I went on that night to experience the unrestrained kindness of the Verizon clerk, to make a bum's day with 4 quarters, and to meander my way home to a delicious dinner with my family as the only white face of the number 6 bus.

Extraordinarily Banal

It's probably time. I know it is. It's probably time to realize my own advice, and seek the extraordinary in the every day as the ease of daily novelty merges into slightly more predictable Denver concrete. That is, my sidelong references some months ago to my own dispair as home-dwellers failed to recognize the fantastic in the everyday "banal" has turned into my own silence on these pages. When I read that others had ceased to "blog" their thoughts away after their traveling adventures had spatially ceased I scoffed. And here I am, finding it difficult to blog my thoughts away. But of course, the extraordinary still exists in Denver - whether in Brock jokes, my own terribleness at Bar trvia nights, or the new job that has me spinning my head at emails from around the globe rather than street scenes on the ground around the globe.

So, what's happened lately? I landed a job in an organization that, on a good day, consists of a total of 7 people who don't mind that I am terrible at obeying authority and hate having a boss; and in which my desk is about ten feet from my bed. What else? - I converted my non-boss "boss" to public transportation in my first big win in changing the world to the extent that she's been driving all of her friends nuts bragging about her new easy commute. If she can be converted, so can you.

Also, it has not ceased to snow, and has barely broken freezing outside, which makes crutches really, really fun. More importantly, it has not ceased snowing and I have yet to become truly annoyed at the fact that I cannot hit the hills and ski. In a spectacular example of a brutal facts moment, I simply sit on the couch or hobble down the street at a painfully (metaphorically, not physically or literally) slow pace accepting calmly the lack of amazing couloirs in my present life. Once my 20 piece kneecap order is reunited as one, I will be back to them. No doubt.

In the meantime, however, the snow seems to remind me of Himalaya more than Tetons; of Kashmir more than Summit County. I don't quite know why, I suppose, aside from the feeling that overcame me as we burst through that tunnel a year or so ago, off of the heinous road and into the valley floor suddenly covered by clouds and snow; and as we rolled into the pristine white of Srinagar. That image taunts my mind, beckoning. But that, too, is a brutal fact. And one of the reasons, in and of itself, that I took this semi-committing job so close to home - so I couldn't fall out of this square state and back onto a travel bug too soon. I remember, of course, how miserable travel is too. I miss it. It's just all too fast to have already ceased taking showers out of a bucket, or having people notice when I wear the same shirt for a week.

There are, of course, benefits to this rich historical land buried in the sterile mansions springing up all around my parent's 1950's era cottage so that richy rich can have 8 bathrooms and an elevator. And heat it all by burning caribou fat from the unnecessarily wasteful life taking up all the oil room in Alaska. I met Jay on the bus the other day, see. Jay. As in Jayarama, who has found his life in Denver for the past two years as a software contractor straight from Bangalore.

"Just like for you India is completely different, for us the US is completely different. When my parents come, they won't know how to use all of this stuff...washing machines, dishwashers, escalators...It's amazing! Here you can have something else take care of all that stuff, so that you can focus on other things. There, you have to take care of yourself!" How fundamentally I agree - in his excitement I gather some semblance of satisfactory approval, as if my own culture has been vindicated not by my own comfort with it, or by others buried in it, or by rationality or thought; but by an onlooker cum participant, excited at the new, and unjudging at the waste. Talking to Jay felt as though I needn't apologize for the idiot-syncracies of my own world, and can instead melt back into it, and into me.

The revelation: I am naturally neurotic. Naturally more rational than most Ugandans. Naturally more motivated to fix things, clean them up, polish them, and make them work. Naturally incapable of sitting, watching, or moving very slowly. Nuance is not my forte. Does this mean I won't try? No. But it means I probably won't be able to meander the streets on a random morning to drink tea with anyone who might pass on a regular basis. Exacerbated by the culture, sure. Exacerbated by the one two...nine white people sitting silently in this coffee shop (and the three Indians - yes, Indians - socializing. How pertinent!). But only exacerbated, not created. For that, you need an individual.