peter falk

This is the hardest part to write because it requires a departure from the mundane. I wasnt able to do it then, and I dont think I can do it now. There was something hidden going on. There is always something hidden going on. Normally we don't look for it. Some of us never do. Some people look so much they just "happen to notice it" all the time. That day in Wudang I was neither looking nor noticing. So whether I can see it now and convey it is something else that remains to be seen. Instead of being a journey forward from that moment, it is a journey backward from the present. It doesn't really matter because time travels both ways. The question is, can we? The night before our departure for Wudang, I'd gone to the bus station to buy tickets. Even though no buses were running, there was still a dimly lit hall with a ticket booth that remained open. The woman wouldn't tell me the bus schedule, but whatever time I asked about, she said there was a bus. They must've had every bus in the province dedicated to the Xiangfan to Wudang route. Or i'd won some cosmic jackpot in synchronicity. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me from the start it's all just a matter of when I choose to get started. It's not so much finding the vehicle that's a problem, but the choice to get on it. We got the 9:30 bus. There's a number for ya. More messages from the universe? 9, 3, 0. 9+3=12. There's a journey around the tarot! A fool and his empress get on a bus to go see a hermit, and end up getting hanged. Or do a hermit and empress get on a bus and turn into fools? The bus dropped us at the entrance to the park. It's not just some mystical place in remote Hubei Province that people never go in order to leave the monks alone or due to quaking fear of the power of their kung fu. It's a thriving and crowded tourist destination like any other. We were mobbed by touts looking to fill empty seats in ther minivans up the mountain to the main trailhead. But we had other plans. We called Tian Liyang, one of the Daoist masters that lives in the area that my doctor, Dr. Zhu, had referred us to. Dr. Zhu is a rather remarkable doctor. He works at the traditional Chinese medicine hospital in Shenzhen. He's head of the qigong massage department. His practice includes herbal treatments, acupuncture, massage, and general energetic work which is a by-product really of his years of practice and cultivation. He cured my mother of her sciatica, a feat which Western medicine has yet to match. We called Tian Liyang on his cell phone and he came to meet us at the park entrance. Daoist monks have cell phones and email. Wudang is lagging far behind the flow of tourists that flock there, so he took us to the one "good" restaurant in town for lunch. How a town that gets so many tourists is so devoid of restaurants is remarkable. It is also remarkable that a city the size and age of Wuhan is so devoid of restaurants, culture, hotels and transportation options. China is remarkable. It never ceases to amaze me. If you're asleep, this is the place to wake up, in the same way a bad roommate awakens you to a BeeGees album after a night of hard drinking. If you are very, very lucky, it might be the way 4-year-olds jumping into your bed awaken you. Don't resist. You'll never get back to sleep. We talked about Master Tian's trips to Germany, Belgium and France where he goes to teach "Daoist culture." He doesn't speak any English so Mrs. Columbo had to translate the whole time. I noticed he was eating with us, so I asked him about bigu. Bigu is a special state achieved by cultivators of the dao. That sounds strange, doesn't it? "Cultivators of the dao." How can the dao be cultivated? It simply is. It always has been and always will be regardless of who or who doesn't "cultivate" it. But people do. Or think they do. He told us he had one month of bigu. He didn't eat or drink for a month. He said he lost weight, but had lots of energy and was never hungry. He continued his workouts, and even got better. He could climb mountains and run and other people couldn't keep up with him. He'd never get tired, but his friends and colleagues would tire keeping up with him. I didn't really understand why the bigu only lasted a month. Perhaps something was lost in translation. Maybe he just likes to eat. The meeting felt very strange. I felt like I was there prematurely and not really ready to deal with this guy, but we kept on. He explained that he left his job as president of the Wudang Daoist Association in order to devote more time to teaching. The government built him a school where he now teaches wugong, the local, and I guess correct, term for Wudang style gongfu. The school was about 10 minutes outside of town, making it quiet and restful. Wudang, though very small, is a noisy and somewhat dirty and uncivilized place full of hawkers, touts, and rip-off artists, hardly reflecting the Daoist culture for which it is famous. Wudang, like the rest of China is a den of vipers. For anyone who has trekked in rattlesnake country, you know what it's like. The difference between Chinese business people and rattlesnakes is that rattlesnakes don't want to actually bite you. Upon arriving at his school, he set up a few demonstrations of wugong with his students and explained that the chief difference between wugong and Shaolin is that with wugong you get better, quicker, and more powerful with age. Shaolin only works for the young and healthy. Eventually your skill and quickness decline. From what I saw of the 84-year-old Ren Farong, a Daoist master near Xi'an, his assessment seemed accurate. He said that Daoists are firmly rooted like trees. The Shaolin are strong, but lack roots. They can take a punch or a blow from a hammer or sword, but if you watch them, they move. The Daoist doesn't move. We tried this. He lifted his leg, gently pushing it towards his student and then released a powerful burst from his foot. His student flew back and busted his ass on the floor more than once. Sometimes the other two students caught him. I said to him, "How do I know you're not all acting?" So he said, "You try." I did. He gave me the same sort of kick, a simple push kick. I dont know if he held back or not, but my feet came up, moved back a few inches, and came back down again in the fighting stance. Aside from this I didn't notice anything. "Just like Shaolin" he said. We did that a few times but he never sent my ass flying. It was always a slight dislodge and landing. I wanted to try kicking him. This whole time I really wasn't into it though. It wasn't why I was there, and I wasn't even really sure why I was there or if I was wasting his time and mine. I'd seen these kinds of demonstrations before, some better and more impressive than others, still others nothing more than showmanship. I was going along with it all and looking for some way to make it a productive meeting since I just spent three days trying to get there and had been planning it for a while. It was like flowing along a river till you got where you were going. So I kicked him a few times. I went easy at first, getting a feel for it. His body would rock back, but his feet wouldn't move. I really started to lay into him with the most powerful kicks I could muster. We started with push kicks, but that really isn't my best kick, so I set my stance and came around with a powerful, rib-breaking, internal organ crushing hook kick. His body rocked back, but his feet didn't move. And all this rocking back seemed like histrionics designed to embellish his point. "You see? Roots, like a tree. Only the Daoists have this. This is the first thing a Daoist must learn. We never teach how to attack. The next thing the student learns is how to absorb the attack. See this picture?" We went over to the bulletin board with photos of his adventures in Europe. "Here people are ramming me with a big log. My feet are still. Only my body is moving. In wugong you must learn this before you learn to fight. That is why people like the Shaolin better, because they learn to fight. Daoists are different. A lot of students leave because they don't learn to fight soon enough. Then after you can do all this, then we teach you how to counter an attack." Although there are some very big schools in Wudang, Master Tian will only take 8 students at a time. Finally, I said to him that all these martial arts are very interesting and I have spent some time with the martial arts. My true interest, however, was immortality. I was schooled in qigong, neidan, and neidan gong and wanted to pursue that path. At this point Mrs. Columbo stopped translating and asked me what neidan gong was, but the master stopped her and explained it in her native language. He dismissed his students and led us into a kind of reception room where we spent the next few hours talking about deep things and driving Mrs. Columbo crazy trying to translate things she's never even thought of. He began by saying immortality is nonsense. The longest-lived Daoist is Zhang Sanfeng, who is several hundred years old, and that is hardly immortal. We had to take a break to play with the puppy. I questioned him about all the Daoist practices I'd learned, surfed into Western alchemy a bit, went on and on about a lot of stuff that in the end is all really bullshit. We humans often think that if we make a big enough pile of bullshit we can really impress people. The U.S. education system encourages and promotes this custom, and so we have a lot of salesmen, politicians and educators, but very few mystics. You're probably all wondering what the hell we could've talked about for four hours and are annoyed that I'm not telling you. Surely there must be some pearls of wisdom in it all, and I'm a selfish bastard for keeping it to myself. Surely there must be something I can take away and show off with to my spiritual friends about how "i know a guy who went to Wudang in China and he says...." It will not suffice you. In the end, he told me what I already knew but refused to accept--the dao has nothing to do with Daoism. Seek the dao and let it unfold naturally. All that alchemy crap is just one way of doing it. You'll take each step when you're ready and not a moment before. The dao cannot be forced. Immortality is unimportant. Only becoming dao matters, and it doesn't matter how you do it. It's going to happen. After this, Mrs. Columbo tried to talk me into staying for a while and studying with him while she went back to work, because she's like that. She'll schlepp her ass for three days to Wudang to interpret for me for four hours and then be perfectly happy to go home and leave me to do my thing. Everyone should be loved like this. And I was considering it. But I was also thinking, "Why am I even thinking about this? He already told me what I came here to hear." Yet I could not stop wanting to stay longer. I was attached to the feelings I was SUPPOSED to have after all that journeying and looking forward to. All that was left was to play on the mountain with Mrs. Columbo. That is all I really wanted to do. I guess she was looking for something bigger. I guess she knew I was too, but in her translator's fatigue hadn't realized I was already shifting. I fell back into a pattern beaten into me by my father to feel the things other people (particularly him) expect you to instead of what's real. We clumsily asked about staying at his school or coming back another time and so forth, but it was very obvious the moment wanted to end. Mrs. Columbo couldn't believe it. After all that--the shitty hotel, the long bus rides, the callithump at the food street restaurant, the iron bladdered bus driver--surely, there must be something more than this. How can he leave us hanging? And that is precisely what remains hidden to those who expect to see.

yeah, maicael winn sent me a link that joint when he heard i was going. never had a chance to check out their joint though. next trip. i'm hoping to go back and have more time to jsut be with the mountain. thanks fer the link. i'd lost it, and it's worth checking out for anyone who's coming this way.

the internet'a a wonderful thing. the yellow pouch is all natural rolling tobacco. the red pouch is organic rolling tobacco. the blue pack are the prerolled regulars. a friend once describedthem as "like smoking a flower." two o those day and yer set. the red pack is prerolled organic. the other packs aren't up to snuff in my opinion. the no filters are so strong you can spend the day nursing one of um. i think they're in like a tan pack or something. thanks for the offer, yoda man. i'll drop you a message. a yellow pouch or pack o blues would be fine.

yeah, when i buy umn in china, i have to pay for the weight of the fikkin husk as well as the meat. but the dude extracts it for ya. go to the local carrefour (french version of walmart) the grocery department smells like a combination of bread and durian. stays in the fridge for a long time too.

ahhhhh, american spirit. i can smell it now. how i miss that here in china. you smoke the red or the yellow pouch? never cared for the pow wow blend except for pipe ceremonies. cant roll it with all those bearberry leaves bustin the paper. a frienda mine sent me a pack of prerolled reds--the organic stuff. man did that have a kick. stretched it out over a coupla months.

hahahahaha! you may not be spared some of it with michael. in 2002 we were scheduled to stay inthe bell tower hotel in xi'an, a really posh joint. when we arrived at the hotel we discovered we'd been kicked out. the gov't was having a meeting and transferred all guests to other hotels around town. fortunately they kept our group together at the same hotel. made perfecft sense at the time, but now i'm thinking they don't always do that.......in any case, it will be much more organized and predictable than my trip to wudang was. stay tuned for part 4.........different bat time, but still the same bat channel.

if yer of european descent you might be better off eating that food. provided it's grown in australia. so what native fruits are there? meat is easy--snakes, lizards, and widgety grubs, or however ya spell it. and kangaroo.

if this is the same as the chinese gouqizi (Lycium barbarum, english: wolfberry), then it's been around a very long time, at least in china towns. i know the spelling looks different, but goji looks like a transliteration for the same thing (zi in this case meaning berry). excellent kidney tonic and lung tonic. you can snack on the dried berries which you can buy incredibly cheaply in any china town. as with everything in chinese medicine it goes by diferent names. dahong gouqizi is a very common variety. means literally "big red wolfberry." Since it was Linnaeus who named it, we can conclude it's been in western herbariums for over 225 years. in china they make a delcious cold soup that's sweet and refreshing from this stuff with jujube and some kind of white fungus.

might wanna try it with a natural source of aspirin like willow bark or wintergreen. usually taken as tea.

REPO MAN BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA FIGHT CLUB

here's what the rest ofthe world doesn't want you to know: it's ok not to love your family, especially if they're real assholes. i knew this by the time i ws 12, but didnt really accept and embrace it until recently (see blog for clues). it ahs to do mainly with my father and maternal grandparents. what you got was approval or disapproval, not love. so you might be right about them not loving you, just approving of your joining the army. on the otehr hand, i have a great realationship with my mom and my father's side of the family (he's an anomoly). i also have a set of friends that are as close as family. so i think to keep from going crazy, you'll need to find a way to build that. don't worry about being different or obsessed or anything like that, dude. greatness never comes from being normal.

tried mantrams?

PART II: A NEW KIND OF KUNG FU The next day had us striking out for Wudang. Before we went to dinner the day before, the very helpful concierge at the Holiday Inn made numerous phone calls to help us arrange travel. It became eminently clear to us that there was no such thing as a two-hour bus to Wudang for 15 yuan. In fact, there was no such thing as a bus to Wudang at all. Mrs. Columbo's facial expression at the discovery indicated to me there was no need to say "I told you so." One of the best things about us is that we don't argue, so I didn't. It's hard to say that to someone who loves you so much and works so hard to please you. So i forwent the pleasure. This week is known as "golden week" in Chinese. There are three such golden weeks--one in February to celebrate Chinese New Year, one in May to celebrate International Labor Day, and one in October to celebrate the Communist revolution. these are the only vacations most Chinese get, so there are one billion people all trying to travel at the same time. This limited our options as most people had the foresight to BOOK AHEAD. We didn't. There is a train to Wudang, but of course it was sold out. There are also trains to nearby destinations like Xiangfan and Shiyan, but they too were sold out. There are absolutely no flights at all, as that market hasn't yet evolved to modern standards (more on that later). The Lonely Planet guide advised that a bus was available from the Wuchang bus station directly to Wudang. It's wrong. The book I always called The Bible in China was disappointing me one turn after another. Perhaps the appellation is still pertinent. That left us with a bus ride to somewhere else. And it was more convenient than we imagined. There was a long distance bus station across the street from the hotel where we could get an express bus to Xiangfan with connections to Wudang. That morning we headed to the bus station and purchased tickets. For a 2 p.m. bus. It was the only one available. Every other damn bus was sold out, and this one was added to the route at the last minute to help meet demand. Now we had the pleasure of spending several hours at the bus station, a crowded, smokey, and stinky place. We checked our bags and went shopping. The bus that showed up at 2 p.m. was a mini-bus. No reclining seats, no leg room. It would be fetal position all the way for a six-hour ride. The bus even stopped on the outskirts of town and picked up a few extra passengers that required setting plastic stools in the aisle for them to sit in. As a safety requirement, the law in most parts of china says that all passengers must be seated. In a regular seat riding in a bus this makes good sense. How safety extends to plastic stools in the aisle is questionable. To begin with the stools are not bolted down. Secondly, in the event of an emergency evacuation, there will be none. People would be trampled and crushed, and the buses here don't have pop out windows in case of such instances. The cramped conditions were not the worst part of the trip though. What was really amazing was that we discovered our bus driver practiced a unique sort of kung fu: iron bladder. I've had this experience before in China. I believe somewhere on Wudang, or perhpas at Shaolin, there is a special school for bus drivers where they learn this skill. I'm certain of it. It involves a special sort or epidermal respiration where excess water is expelled through the skin, not as sweat, but as vapor. If you watch the bus drivers skillful in this technique, you can see the cloud of vapor around them like the mirages that appear on highways in the desert. I didn't eat or drink anything starting an hour before the bus drive and nothing during. This is the best course of action and allows you, by cheating, to challenge the iron bladder's endurance. Mrs. Columbo shouted to the hostess to stop the bus. After a minute or two, it was clear she hadn't heard, so Mrs. Columbo climbed over me into the aisle and stuggled, like a runningback at the goal line, to reach shouting distance from her and called out again. The hostess stood up and said they'd hit the next gas station. What surprised me is that no one else supported her calls. Was it really possible that she was the only person on the whole bus who had to pee? Were all these people iron bladder practitioners? And was this an important clue indicating the iron bladder school is located in the Wudang area? As the bus pulled into the gas station we saw exactly what was expected during an emergency evacuation. The people in the aisle could not get up fast enough as people stumbled and fell forming a violent scrum, thus delaying another emergency evacuation. Now this is puzzling. What were all those people on the bus going to do? Just endure their agony until arriving in Xiangfan? This is one of the great mysteries of the Chinese mentality to foreign visitors. they just let themselves be herded around like this. Nobody thinks to change the situation. The origins of this go back thousands of years and explain a lot about modern, uh, make that present day, China. I didn't really have to go too badly but i did, to be on the safe side. The driver remained in the bus with the engine running. As i glanced over, i looked for a trucker's buddy tucked away somewhere that he might be using, but spied none. I didn't see it while reboarding either. That would have surely debunked the myth of iron bladder kung fu, but without it, the legend and mystery live on. Over three hours after that piss break we arrived in Xiangfan without another stop. He careened along dark country roads that were in such disrepair and at such a speed that we felt like we were riding inside a paint can stuck in one of those hardware store paint can mixers. Only this was a six-hour affair instead of 2 or 3 minutes. He dropped the passengers off across the street from the bus station, closed the door, and drove off. Where the Hell could he have been going? That made over six hours without urinating, and he was still going strong. I wondered if he could make a ful 24-hour day. Even when I did my vision quest and didn't eat or drink for 5 days, I still had to piss once a day. I marvelled at his achievement. Taxis and pedi-cabs awaited us. I never know how they know these extra buses are coming and aren't going to stop at the bus station. A friendly local advised us not to try and make Wudang that night. There were no buses, the station was closed, and we would have to rent a private vehicle. Plus getting a hotel in the middle of the night would prove difficult. We could see the dark and silent station across the street and knew he was correct. Here again, we were delayed in yet another primitive modern city. This place really was like Guigang. The hotels were about the same quality, the bus station closed early, and the people had the same unfashionablness and gawking habits. They accosted you everywhere to go somewhere else, a hotel or restaurant, and we ignored them all. We found a nearby hotel the friendly local pointed out to us, and it was adequate for an overnight. I'm not sure what to make of it really though as they offered hourly rates and had a poster on proper condom use by the elevator. In this reagrd it was different than Guigang as in Guigang people pretend they don't have sex. The other chief difference turned out to be the food and beer. It was better. They even had a tasty local dark beer. The first room the girl showed us had twin beds and was 180 yuan. We thought it was high for the quality. She looked at us and said, 'Oh, but you don't need separate beds, do you?" I burst out laughing hysterically as this was the first time a stranger anywhere in China was so frank about such an observation. She said it so innocently and so matter-of-factly, it was hysterically refreshing. She took us to a single that was only 100, and that was acceptable. It had little packets of special Chinese medicine "sex cleaners" for washing your parts before and after, labeled in Chinese and English. one was specially formulated for males, the other for females. I would've kept them but as novelties but they cost 10 yuan each. The view from the hotel was other people's hotel rooms. For some reason, the chinese don't like to close curtains. And really, some of them should.

PART I: HOLIDAY INN, A MUSICAL Mrs. Columbo had some stuff to do and messaged me to take a cab to the Starbucks and she'd meet me there. The taxi driver didnt know Starbucks in either Chinese or English, nor did he recognize the logo on the business card I kept in case of just such an eventuality, which really surprised me because it's across the street from the Garden Hotel, probably the most common destination of foreign visitors to Guangzhou. Fortunately he drove right by it before turning into the hotel so I was able to point it out to him. Just as I arrived another message came from Mrs. Columbo instructing me to wait because she was busy doing some things. Being the anxious traveler that I am, delays and waiting, especially on trips like this where i am looking forward to setting foot for the first time on Wudang Mountain, ancient home of Daoism, taiji, and an unknown number of immortal and mortal masters alike, and made famous by the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," I was very easily annoyed. I'd procured every foreign newspaper I could at the Shangri-la Hotel before catching the train so I'd have a lot to read. In spite of this, my thoughts were constantly at Wudang--what would the teacher be like that Dr. Zhu has referred me to? Who else would we meet? What would the birds be like? How many days would we spend wandering trails? What would the journey be like from Wuhan? Ah, Wuhan. That was the first glitch in the whole thing. I told Mrs. Columbo we should fly as close to Wudang as we could in order to maximize our time there. Since her Chinese is obviously better than mine, we decided it would be easier for her to arrange the travel, especially since it would involve a lot of ground transportation. maybe THAT was the first glitch: letting her arrange travel. Mrs. Columbo can be a little bit of an airhead at times. She's also very distracted right now getting her business off the ground. She is extremely busy dealing with the galactic bureaucracy, marketing, training, travelling to meet potential clients, and so forth. The last thing she needs is to plan more travel. She called me one day and told me the price of tickets from Guangzhou to Wuhan, the biggest city in Hubei province near Wudang, and the price to fly to Xiangfan, the nearest airport to Wudang. She said she couldn't find a discount fare to Xiangfan but the fare to Wuhan was pretty cheap. Anyway one of her friends told her you can get buses from Wuhan to Wudang, and it only takes a few hours to get there. "That doesn't sound right. Have you looked at a map?" I asked. "No I haven't, but it's ok. The friend who told me has done it, so she knows. It's also very cheap. Only like 15 yuan." "That's impossible." "No really. We talked about it." "15 yuan." "Yes." "Just a few hours." "Yes." "Well it doesn't sound possible to me." "Don't worry. I'll take care of everything." >sigh< "Alright." I was looking forward to a vacation of about 9 days on Wudang, but that was already squashed because of a seminar that came up that Mrs. Columbo had to go to on the 5th. That meant my vacation was shortened by 4 days already. since Mrs. Columbo was also my translator, I really couldn't hang out there with my limited Chinese hoping to talk about Daoism and qigong and the mysteries of the universe. None of that mattered though. It was hard enough for Mrs. Columbo to get away for the 4 days she'd arranged and I appreciated that and was happy for the time together. She really is the perfect girlfriend--independent, like me. we don't need to be together all the time, but love when we are. I remembered our journey to Lijiang exactly one year ago and how smoothly it went. Not once did we argue. We were never bored with each other's company, and we stumbled into some marvelous adventures that are not a part of any tours. We got to Wuhan early that evening. The airport was pretty primitive for such a big city. It was more like an oversized bus station. No mcdonald's. No Starbucks. No coffee at all. Mrs. Columbo was tired and wanted to stay overnight. I wanted to push on to Wudang, but she begged me, and I could see how tired she was. So what the hell? It's a vacation together, and that was as important to me as going to Wudang. She actually didn't really want to go. The only reason she was going is because she loves me. That's a fact. She didn't even make me promise to go to some lame girly destination "next time." She was just happy to be with me doing what made me happy. I'm still reeling with the wonder of it all. We started calling hotels listed in the Lonley Planet guide. All wrong numbers. She insisted on a place with a pool, so I told her the Holiday Inn would probably have one. Holiday Inns always have a pool. According to Lonely Planet, the rooms were around 600 yuan, but that was affordable for one night. We got the phone number at the airport reservation service, confirmed the existence of the pool and discovered they were only charging 350 yuan. They said the hotel was in the heart of downtown, Hankou District, and what bus to take not to get there. That's right. I mean, why should a bus go from the airport to downtown? When you really stop to think about it, such a service is virtually useless. It's far better to just stop at some industrial outskirt of the city and dump people in a deserted parking lot of some abandoned industrial facility and then lie to them about where the hotel actually is. I swear I am not making this up. There were truthfully no buses to downtown from the airport. They did actually dump us and all the other passengers at some abandoned industrial faciltiy where a few taxis were waiting for suckers like us. Mrs. Columbo told one driver we were going to the Holiday Inn, and the taxi driver refused to take us. He pointed across the way and said, "It's right there. 5 minutes walking." So we schlepped our bags in the general direction he was pointing and kept our eyes peeled for a Holiday Inn. I could tell it wasn't a Holiday Inn as soon as it came into view. It was a run down Chinese hotel called the "Holiday Hotel" and in no way a four star one. It was pink. We dodged a lot of traffic to get there. Wuhan is a city of honkers. Drivers don't stop, they honk. It was closed for remodeling. Someone was lying to us. Either the taxi driver sent us to the wrong hotel, or the girl at the reservation desk lied to us about this being a Holiday Inn in the heart of downtown. In china it is perfectly possible that a hotel could be closed for business, answer the phone, tell you they have a pool, a room, and the going rate for that room, but not tell you they are currently closed because YOU failed to ask. Well I was pretty pissed. I'd been living in Shenzhen too long. It's almost civilized there. Fortunately, the security guard was friendly enough and told us where the actual, real Holiday Inn is. We hailed a taxi and he knew the destination. His cab also smelled like a cessepool. He, or someone riding in his cab, had shit their pants. It was the only explanation. We literally had to hang our heads out the window to survive the ride and wondered how the hell he could sit there smiling away as he negotiated traffic. The only time we pulled in our heads was to avoid oncoming traffic which wasnt very often. God were we glad to arrive! Holiday Inn! An oasis of civilization! Bing Crosby! White Christmas! They did in fact have our reservation and it was in fact only 350 rmb. and they did in fact have a pool that was CLOSED FOR REMODELING!!!!! Mrs. Columbo collapsed in my arms. The one thing she wanted to do that night, if nothing else, was go for a swim. Welcome to China. This is puzzling. Why would hotels close for remodeling during a peak travel weak? You've got the whole year to do your remodeling, and they decide it needs to be done during the May holiday. It was pretty obvious to us that Wuhan was not a popular travel destination. The hotel was offering rooms at almost half price. The Lonely Planet guide gave this city maybe two pages of coverage. The whole chapter on Hubei Province was shorter than the section on either Kunming or Chengdu alone. It was a city of noise, eyesores, and distinctly unfashionable people. This was Mrs. Columbo's chief objection to the place. This is her main yardstick for measuring civilization, and though you in the West may protest, it has merit in China. That night we went to the food street on Minsheng Lu. All chinese towns and citites have food streets. They're just basically streets lined with restaurants. The food street here in Wuhan was well lit and lively when we arrived. We paid the taxi and struck out through the big decorative gate. Immediatley we were assailed by hawkers wanting us to eat in their restaurants. They were anxious, noisy and alert. They also groped, pulled and shoved at passersby to maneuver them into their respective establishments. We strolled, er, make that swerved and dodged, our way down the street which, for a city the size of Wuhan, was pathetically small. Back in the trenches of Guigang we had bigger food streets. And Wuhan is basically an oversized Guigang. The restaurants weren't remarkable in any way. They were mediocre places serving local cuisine. The local cuisine gave them a sort of cultural value to the tourist and the food was OK. But what relly mattered was the spectacle and cacophony. Not only were people being jostled, grabbed, shouted at and punched by touts, the touts in turn jostled, grabbed, shouted at, and punched one another. Meanwhile, a hellish chorus of sound from amateur (and I use the term lightly here) musicians endeavored to entertain the diners. These people were horrible. We took a front row seat to get the best performance of it. We chose a busy, noisy restaurant at the head of the food street that was the biggest and brightest there. As soon as the waitress walked away we were accosted by musicians, or should i say, people with musical instruments, trying to sell us a song or two. What they didn't realize is that we didn't have to pay for this service. The others were so loud, all we had to do was sit and listen. Oh, they'd smile eagerly and pleasantly as if nothing would please them greater than to give us a song. Some had song lists in English, and others didn't. They were as bad as the touts in the street. If you didn't respond to them, they'd shove the list in your face. If that didnt work, they'd play a few notes of a bad song like "Yesterday Once More" or 'How Dry I Am". And if you shouted at them "Bu yoale! (We don't want any!)" They'd just smile and laugh and keep insisting. I am not making that up either. They really did play "How Dry I Am." I burst into hysterical laughter and Mrs. Columbo wondered why. So I sang my drunken Daffy Duck version of "How Dry I Am" for her so she could laugh too. she of course asked me why that song is so funny, so I gave her all the pertintent cultural background I had available on it. It should've been obvious to these people that we were trying to have a private and semi-romantic conversation, but that didn't matter. Some of the "musicians" were so obstinate, the waitress would have to come and clear them out. The worst part of it was the competition. There had to be 20-25 different combos playing the cafe all at once, and each one wanted to be heard above the others. There were basically two types--those with traditional chinese instruments and those with a guitar and a saxophone. The worst part of all these was a male/female duo with a guitar and sax. The girl hollared these pop tunes while strumming the guitar. And I'm not talking about punk rock, Johnny Lydon, Ian Mackaye angst-ridden shouting. This was more like the howl of a wounded animal. It didn't sound like singing at all, and you couldn't even hear the guitar. The only time you couldn't hear her sing is when the guy drowned her out with his sax playing. What you have to understand is that people were paying for this. They paid good money to hear these people scream. Or to have a sax bell stuck in their faces for a bad rendition of "How Dry I Am" or "Swanee River." Thank God they didn't know any Beatles' songs! This is just the sort of thing that can ruin a good meal without the power of laughter.

an interesting exercise is to compare the conduct of intelligence and warfare in the recent iraq war to sun tzu. gotta wonder if those sons of bitches ever even read it......

best beer i ever had was gulden drak from belgium.

back from wudang now. working on an article about the trip. it wasnt what i expected at all. but still quite an adventure. i'll post the article when i'm done. it will be looooonnnnngggggg. at some point i'll catch up with the list too...............

speaking of which, i'm on my way there in few minutes. gotta rendezvous with mrs. columbo in guangzhou, and then it's off to wudang. so i'll probably be somewhat incommujnicato like i have been most of this week to due moving, weak internet access, etc. c y'all later

yeah, but that happens later. i'm starting to see that now, shift in color and consistency, and get the fragrance. you have to thru the water stage first. mrs. columbo wonders about it......she's commented on the appearance of my "jingye."

yeah, of course thats a good point. i guess what i'm saying is to look for the explosion, not so much the method. in other words, dont get caught up in the method or the model. what you really want is the explosion.

i found the story stored on yahoo, but for some reason it wont open it or let me down load it. i typed it on another computer here in china back in '03. which means this computer in china could have trouble iwth it. shit like that happnes here. no i have to see if someone at home has kept a file of these and if so, can they copy and paste it into a new document.

those are very similar. a cupla slight differences in position or instructions. but very very similar, yes. they work.

i had the taoist immortals show up in a class i was teaching one day when it was really hard and absolutley draining me. if i can dig up the story, i'll post it here.

i remember asking tom brown jr. about chakras one time. he looked at me and said, "the spirit is infinite. why limit yourself to chakras?" the box i was in exploded and life has never been the same since........