A Taoist Exercise
In Training Taxi Drivers

When people ask me to reconcile integrating both Taoist and Buddhist thinking into my daily life, I tell them I don't see any contradictions. The Buddha sits. The Taoists move. It's about being in a place while you're there. When you're on the road, it's best to observe the laws of change.

I put Taoism into practice when I'm crossing the Shanghai streets. But this is a rather recent development. For in Shanghai, as in all Chinese cities, cars observe laws of size and perceived priority. Cars have priority over pedestrians, so taxi drivers think pedestrians are supposed to shirk back at their beeping. At first I did this, just because I was scared. Then I started fighting back.

I asserted that the taxi drivers were dogs. Dogs that need training. So I began training them.

I would march out to the edge of disaster. If the taxi driver tested me and I jumped back, I'd just knock his side view mirror in. Or bang his trunk. Or, if the approach was slow, just tap his hood and wag my finger at him. During the rain, when every cab is full, the situation is perilous. My crumpled umbrellas are testament to the fact that I have solely supported a small percentage of the umbrella industry in this fine city. Then I learned that the law was on my side.

A recent development in city law is that motorists are at fault for all harm done to pedestrians, even if the pedestrian swerves wildly into a crosswalk in search of some insurance payout. After I learned this, I realized a law of motion: Taxi drivers will swerve, they will stop. If they don't, they get judicial wrath and have to pay for my metal hip implant.

So we swerve. We dodge. And slowly take back the streets. Lao Tze would be proud.

Playing the Qin Toward a Monkey:
A Guqin Master Lays It All Out...And Your Narrator Catches a Third of It...

I met Mr. Mao Yi today. I felt like a cow in the Chinese saying "play a qin to a cow" (do something beautiful that passes over someone's head). My Chinese zodiac is the monkey.

If any of you are in the neighborhood...Mr. Mao is giving a performance in Shanghai next month. He disclosed to me that he may premiere his electric guqin, which is currently under development "in the lab". I told him it was like Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He didn't know anything about Bob Dylan.

Anyway, I got the details from his website (won't find no english here):

July 15th, Mr. Mao Yi Guqin Solo Concert

Nanjing Culture and Arts Center Concert Hall, ChangJiang Road, # 101
ticket hotline: 025--84719560
tickets: 50 kuai

PP (Post Post) How did I meet him? It was back at the "secret guqin meeting" he held on "Long Happiness Road" in January of this year. I didn't have a chance to talk to him then, only to get his business card. I interviewed him yesterday for an article I'm writing about guqin culture in Shanghai. A mysterious musical genius indeed. I had the feeling when I met him that I was reliving a dream... or a past life. Between sips of rose tea, he'd flip open his Chinese hand fan and hide behind his Dhamma verse he'd hand-written on the blades. He'd close it with a flick to reveal a gentle smile before launching into a quiet and passionate description of things I'd have to spend all the gongfu in the world to understand. Such a treat! Here's a clip that reveals his artistry. I think the portion of the song he's playing is "flowing water".

Coming to Shanghai's AIDS:
Into the Bowels of the City's CDC


I skipped oral Chinese and extensive reading class today to work on some projects. First item was to finish the draft of an article I'm writing about guqin culture in Shanghai for the local monthly English mag, That's Shanghai. The editor liked it, she did! Next was to meet with one of the directors of government AIDS prevention efforst in Shanghai.

The guard at the gate of the CDC campus was very skeptical of the blond in the Michigan baseball cap (your narrator, of course) who came marching into the gate looking for Vice-Prime-Important-Person So-and-So in the mid-afternoon heat. But after a few phone calls and a some stern looks, he told me to come along and started in with the old "your Chinsese isn't so bad" and "how long have you been in our China" sort of banter.

He took me to the end of a long, dim, puke green corridor to the messy office office of the Vice-Prime-Important-Person. While I waited for Mr. So-and-So to return, I began to imagine that maybe the rest of China's regulatory/health/civil society organs resembled this one, and that maybe five years down the line there will be enough inspectors to ban two-stroke engines and other sources of unease in a Shanghainese's daily life. I--on the run from standardization--had found just the sort I've been so sorely missing...the non-corporate type. The public good type. The utilitarian, working to avoid catastrophe type.

Mr. So-and-So was very pleased to hear my plan. He said that even though the central government has given priority to HIV education, there aren't enough city resources (and willingness)to cover everything the first year. This year it's educating "all of the city's "misses", second priority are I.V. drug users, third is the 4 million+ migrant worker population. They're the ones who keep the "misses" in business. Last on the list is the "same sex love" population because "that problem isn't so serious". Or, read between the so-and-sos and we get the truth: no one knows how serious the problem is. And society as a whole isn't really ready to face the facts.

Ah well. At least the government is. Thank you, Big Other.

The CDC will print the ecduational information my comrades and I collect, edit, and design. Plus they'll give us condoms. Not the flavored ones DKT will give us (banana, chocolate, mint, etc--8 in all) but condoms still the same.

In all, a productive day. And since I carried around a translated copy of "Charlotte's Web" on the bus to the other side of town (hong qiao..blah) to the CDC, I figure that, with the interviewing I did, I got enough oral and extensive reading experience to make up for what I missed in class.

Stay tuned for a final draft of the educational skit I'm writing.

And for a lowdown on what's happening in your own life, detach from the web. Do it now! Before it's too late!

Until next time...

Condoleezza, Can You Hear me?
Two Consular Comments Worth Concern

One

A new addition to the Plane Trees outside the United States consulate in Shanghai: Grease and barbed wire.

Is that really necessary? The French across the street don't think so.


Two


This just came in the mail today:

Hello Mr. Adolph,

I am just checking to see if you are still in Bangladesh. Our system
shows you arriving on May 30, 2004 and staying for a period of months.
Please advise....Thanks and have a great day!

Bryan J. DiMare
Cons. Intern/American Citizen Services
U.S. Embassy, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Phone: 880-2-885-5500 ext. 2610
Fax: 880-2-882-4449

In accordance with E.O. 12958 this message is unclassified.

What is going on here? Who is this "Mr. Adolph"? First the guards at the Dhaka embassy confiscate my Tiger Balm. Now this. Must my government demonstrate incompetence at every step of the way?

Oh, Tech God
I'll Follow You Anywhere!

As a child, here's something I don't remember seeing on the box of my Talking Computron Delux:



Maybe I just wasn't paying attention?

Enter Psyberdelic Space
Talk Talk Talk Will Blow Your Mind Mind Mind

Check out my webmaster's recent spoken word updates. There's an interesting talk by Erik Davis about The Cults of Burning Man, Lorenzo's own work, a Palenque talk by the late great Terence McKenna, and others.

Write on, Lorenzo!

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.

A great old friend, Laurence Scott, passed away yesterday. He's the taller one on the right. This is a picture taken two summers ago with his partner in their garden. As you can see, he was a trickster. He will be missed.