Reality Postponed

So now I'm here to take up blogging again. I dug it the first go round but when my cell phone internet thingee got snagged, I says to myself 'what's the point?' It's said that a blog is more or less a "broadcast" like radio, and if you can't update it habitually, then people get annoyed and decide you're a punk and to hell with you. so I quit, but now I'm back, at least for a while, so isn't that great? Lately I've been getting a lot of question from all quarters and they all ask the same kind of things: what's up? Or whatcha doing? Or how you doing? Or even the occasional 'how da hell you doing you crazy bastard?' These are fair questions I'd like to take this opportunity to maybe outline some of my going-ons in the past year. You can forgive me if I rhapsodize: I've had this reoccurring impulse to grab people off the street and tell them EVERYTHING. This impulse is duly suppressed and if you really know your Freud you know that no impulse ought to be hidden and crushed forever. If you don't let it out you become "symptomatic" which is to say a raving lunatic and you are despised and pitied by all. So like all good things this blog is a release, a release of everything, imagination run amok. So what can I say? Africa. Scary land teeming with unwashed masses, violence, poverty, misery, et cetera. A lot of not very nice words or concepts emerge in a free association exercise on that word. But this result I think, I hope, is exaggerated. Zambia has some of the cleanest air in the world, and some of the cleanest people. It's true. I know it's pretty mundane thing to say, but it sticks in my mind. When thinking 'poor peasant farmer' we image what? The filth, the back breaking work, the illiteracy, the human rights violations and all of that is there, but it never got to me like that. The human mind can and does adjust to all circumstances, and for the people I've lived with for these years, this toiling is never shocking, how could it be? It's just life, and life is hard, and you know it's hard for EVERYBODY. The difference in wealth was always trick to reconcile. You can image how sweet and juicy all the many possessions, gear, and other miscellany could seem to a boy who literally has nothing but the taters on his back. All these vast and wholesome riches! But to a rich westerner it may all look a little pitable: my battered frying pan, my rat-chewed shirt, my $20 cell phone. People would come begging for work, $5 a day! You might feel a little 'ruling class' paying someone like that, but they were thrilled to get it. I don't want to go on too long, just want to get this blog rolling. Expect frequent updates as I traverse India and beyond.