Out of the Cave
And Into the Night

This is not the way to write a blog. If I were more interested in "maintaining an audience," I'd feed you my life three paragraphs per day. But since I've been living the life of a hermit and pale-skinned meditator/student, and my computer is slow and I'm full of excuses, the blog doesn't get the priority it once did. But isn't it better to have one big glob of your narrator than nothing at all?

Your narrator has decided to leave Shanghai in mid-August. Then we're off to the Chinese temple again, probably to teach the monks English for a couple of weeks. I like teaching monks. Then Yellow Mountain, Qufu, Qingdao and Beijing, visiting friends and places of significance. Mid-September, we'll probably be in Michigan. Then we're going to with the sham wife with a hammock and a mission to travel overland from Michigan to Peru. At that time, I might change the name of this blog to "A hammock and two keyboards."

What can you expect from my periodic updates while i'm still in Shanghai? Nothing. I'm not the bloggist I once was. But here's what I'm going to try to accomplish. (This is as much for my own benefit as it is your entertainment and edification).

I have been looking at ukules. The guqin is too impractical to take backpacking in Latin and South America, but I want to have an instrument. In Peru maybe I can get a charango.

I also want to do research on people like Bai Guang (Bai Kuang).

I only have three weeks of Chinese classes left at the Conservatory. And since I've cut back all my weekend and night classes, I've got time to--as the Chinese say--"add oil." Yes, I have time. Ambition...well. It fluctuates like the weather.

Why is it so important and still such a drag to study? Because it's test season in China.

Yesterday I sat the practice Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK, or Chinese level test) at Jiaotong University. It was three hours of hard seat hell. Fill in the blank, grammar, listening comprehension, reading. No oral, which is what I'm best at.

Even though if I do well on the real test in July, it could allow me to attend university in China, or get a good job, or a gaudy certificate to hang on the wall, the HSK isn't so important to me. If I fail, I'm not going to have to get a job at McDonalds. Not so for the 8 million or so Chinese who just took college entrance exams. Half of them will never see the inside of a university classroom. To the detriment of my academic record, I am not the sort who studies to pass a test.



After the test, an ex called me because he was going to meet the boss of Mollis Bar. He knew I had a plan to do HIV prevention outreach and education in bars, so he invited me to tag along.

My friend's reason for being there had something to do with his business of selling web-connected flat screens that bar patrons can send SMS messages to from their mobile phones. He sent one that said, "Nice to see you, Josh," and it cost him one kuai. I don't know exactly what he talked to the boss about because it was all in Shanghainese. That irks me, but shouldn't.

I talked to the owner about passing out condoms and safer sex info to my young comrades there. I'm working with an organization called DKT International, that usually targets migrant and sex worker populations. It is responding to the Chinese government's recent mandate to get HIV under control before it's too late. I was the first person to talk to them about actually educating the gay population in Shanghai.

The owner was excited about it, but suggested that I make it into a show of some sort, that just passing out condoms and information wasn't enough. That's just what I did not want to hear and do not want to do. Drag and crazy shit was fun in college, but...well, I guess I'm still a college student. We'll see how it goes. I might have to snag friends and bring cucumbers.

I realized that Shanghai at night is entirely different from the one I know when I follow the termite schedule I've had the last three and a half months. I get up with the sun and go to class before most people go to work. I come home tired and bleary after teaching yuppies how to get raises and say things like "step into my office, baby". I forget that there are flashing lights and altered states and longing stares. The whole blind rush of history only really hits me at night. It's only when I go out and see the fleeting passions and raw margins outside anyones control that I give in to the compulsion to record.

Whenever I leave somewhere, I feel an overwhelming sense of possibility mingled with nagging feelings of apprehension and failure. I always leave too many things for the last few months I'm in a place. The more I move, the more I confirm that every place is more or less the same, that every situation more or less has the same ground rules, the more I realize accomplishing goals in the material realm doesn't bring the satisfaction it once did. The proper thing to do for my own spiritual and mental health would be to give up my far-flung external ambitions. But I'm not going to do that. I'm young and stupid and determined. That's my assessment.

These next two months are my attempt to enter the realm of adventurous direct experience without falling into heedlessness and misery. To get busy and active and sexy without going mad.

Check back from time to time. See just how much I give in to the compulsion to record.