Compared with India, home is another world, another fantasy, perplexing and surreal. I remember while in India having bizarre dreams of home, dreams in which I was overwhelmed with a sense of dejavu within the dream itself. And now that I am home I am living those dream scenarios, only slightly altered, so the dejavu is doubled and I am subsumed partially into the dream, or the memory of the dream. After these episodes pass I am left disoriented, cold sweating, and humming with the intense tones of the dream itself. Curiously, after these episodes I feel almost good, as though some latent pressurized unconscious energy has come to light and been burnt off. I think this is a form of re-entry shock, of processing.

Yesterday I went to my father's gallery. As he explained the intellectually complex, thematically layered, and aesthetically beautiful work of Tom La Duke, an artist that I am convinced is a genius, the sense of being in a completely different world to India was almost unbearably potent. I felt in me the spectrum of human ability, of circumstance, of fate, and of the almost mystical beauty and importance of certain human's creative ability. Viewing the paintings and sculpture of La Duke, is like being in the presence of a master meditator and being able to not only feel the sensations of that meditator, but to observe them conjured into beautiful forms. Having my intellect and emotions stimulated in this almost exclusively aesthetic way, was shocking. In India I was so distant from such states and I realized how most of India, and ultimately the world, will never know these realms of creativity, these qualities of humanity. For so many the world is a harsh place, where people live hand to mouth, unconsciously repeating the stifling patterns of outmoded tradition. I know that there is sophistication and beauty in those old worlds, I have spent the last seven years of my life studying it. But I have found this beauty to be mostly divorced from the people who live in those worlds. I no pretense to being able to fathom even a fraction of the complex of reasons for this. But I can see this far: There are few truly good and amazing people in this world, and our world disparately needs more of them; Here in America we live in a tenuous blink of time marked by unbelieveable prosperity, power and potential. A blink of time.

In Thailand now. Compared with Varanasi, Bangkok is like candyland, so soft, so sweet, so easy. I can't stop worrying about Kristin back in Varanasi, Shiva's anus, that shit strewn, male infested, netherworld. Kristin and I had been talking about how many Indians we interacted with, especially in Varanasi, seem almost retarded (yes this is harsh but unfortunately true, especially when sick and needing medical care)- literally incredibly slow and totally incompetent. Yesterday on the way to the airport I was talking with a guy named Kendrick who has been living in Varanasi as part of a University of Wisconsin abroad program. He told me that there is a term for this retarded quality of Benarsis, I don't remember the bojpuri word but it meant something like Benares style.

Some sweetness: On my last day in Varanasi, Kristin and I took a boat down the Ganga. I noticed off the bow that there was a boil in the water ahead. My heart raced with the feeling that it was the endangered Gangetic dolphin. Only a few yards off and it surfaced again, sleek and gray, its whole body sliding out of the filthy green water. We oohed and awed as it lept completely out of the water six times. A serendipitous and hopeful farewell.

The next morning as we sat on the Ghats a man approached and told me that since I have spent so much money and come so far that I must take a swim in the sacred Ganga. I told him that it was polluted with sewage. He replied, "baby little pee, little something, no problem, Ganga is sacred." I told him its not just baby little pee, its the piss and shit of two million people in Varanasi alone that goes untreated straight into the river that causes the pollution. He walked away. This scenario shows well the problem with India- ignorance! To be fare, there are many cultural and environmental reasons for this ignorance beyond the control or remedy of individuals, i.e. caste system, overpopulation, colonialism.

I was going to write that despite the filth and chaos and difficulty, and perhaps because of these qualities, I still love the place. But I'm not sure if I still do. What I loved about India in the past was the invigorating bolt of foreignness and difference that blasts through habitual ways of seeing reality, casting everything into relativity and illuminating life with new depths of perspective and self-awareness. During this trip I realize I have done this already to the point where I don't want to do it anymore (at least for a while), that all I know now is relativity, and that through perspective I have assessed the value of certain aspects of reality and my life. Now it is time to pursue what I have found most valuable, maeningful and joyful. Maybe this affirmation of a need to grow roots, to actualize and manifest, to follow what has solidified as meaning for me, is what this trip was about.

For the last two years living in the almost too nurturing lap of Humboldt, Kristin was longing for such a bolt of difference and perspective, and when I left her in India she was riding the energy of a shifting, growing consciousness, confident that she has more exploring to do. Already she has expressed how much more she appreciates her life in America, and already I can sense the potent, almost mystical churning and crumbling and reconstructing of reality that is taking place within her that will translate into a literal expansion of consciousness and understanding of herself and the world, and herself in the world. It is a joy to see. I just pray that she will be safe and I can't wait to see who she is when she gets back.

At the airport I met a girl named Penny who had been traveling solo in India for three months. Her reasons for traveling were similar to Kristin's. She had some amazing and terrifying stories. India is really a different beast when traveling as a solo female, and I will never know just how different. She told me one story in particular that I thought worth recounting here: At a train station in Gorakphur, a harsh border town, she had been waiting all night for a train. She was the only westerner at the station. Early in the morning she took some money out of the ATM in the station and noticed that two men were watching her particularly closely, but this wasn't too alarming because for the entire wait there was a arch of men around her, just staring the gross but mostly harmless India-man-stare. She was thankful when the train arrived at 6AM and the crowd around her dispersed, but she realized quickly that she would have to plunge back into it if she wanted to get on the train. In the midst of the shoulder to shoulder jam of people she felt to hands slip under her arms and literally lift her off the ground and carry her away from the train towards a dark corner. It was the two men who had been watching her. The dozens of men and women getting onto the train watched as she was robbed right in front of them. They took her 7000 rupees but thankfully left her passport. She got on the train with the men who had just robbed her, though they got off a stop later. On the train a bent and filthy ancient woman approached her, spread her arms and burst into tears, and pulled from her rags a few rupee notes, probably all that she had. Penny would not accept it, and the old lady began yelling admonishments at the men around her on the train. The dozens of them who could have done something, who transgressed against the ancient edic that "the guest is god". Those fucking cowards asked her if she was Ok, and she told them to fuck off.

Kristin if you read this, please fly or at least ride first class and plan well.

Reading V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, a travelogue of his first journey to the East when he was 29 years old, I came across these passages that struck a chord with me. In the first you could switch Varanasi for Cairo and the statement would be equally accurate:

'Cairo revealed the meaning of the bazaar: narrow streets encrusted with filth, stinking even on this winter's day; tiny shops full of shoddy goods; crowds; the din, already barely supportable, made worse by the steady blaring of motorcar horns; medieval buildings partly collapsed, others rising on old rubble, with here and there sections of tiles, turquoise and royal blue, hinting at a past of order and beauty, crystal fountains and amorous adventures, as perhaps in the no less disordered past they always had been.'

The East began in the chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers and that luggage was in danger.'

I am back from the darkside. Amazing what a different world this is now that I'm not sick. Its like my soul had left me for a while and I was just an aching bag of flesh propelled by dull instinct through a harsh world splattered with shit. Now that I've got my soul back, the world is still harsh and splattered with shit, but I can laugh at the things that had frustrated me and provoked repititious diatribes of condemnation, I can smile at children calling up to an old baba to throw them the kite he had caught, I can simply enjoy sitting and watching the ganga flow by. I can shop and haggle so well that an Indian jewellery maker asked me jokingly, "what school did you learn this (haggling) from, I want to go to this school." I told him I learned it from the school of India. Though I probably payed a fortune.

But still I have a deep unrelenting sense that this journey is not for me, that what needs tending in myself and in the world must happen at home. Also, I am certin that Kristin will have a more potent and generally better time if I am not here constantly looking homeward. So I've decided to return early. I'll be back in L.A. on Dec 5th.

This morning as we glided into Assi on a bicycle rickshaw we were greeted by a troop of Babas with ornately decorated cows. Looking closer I realized that the cows were deformed. One cow had a third leg growing out of a hump on its back, another had a grotesque face as though it had been melted and then rehardened into a twisted mass with only remotely identifiable features, kind of like a picasso, an eye up here, a mouth over here, some teeth, another eye over there. Apparently these cows are seen as sacred.

The recurring mantra of this trip so far has been, this is an ancient world. At night we look through low crooked doorways into firelit lives, into scenes that were lived a thousands years ago or more. An entire family sitting together on a packed dung floor. The men weary from a day with the buffalos or pedaling their rickshaws, or hawking vegetables, swaddled women squatting over a smoking pile of chacoal. Outside cows breaing, goats crying, pigglets following their mothers from one refuse pile to the next. But where once these scenes charmed me, even soothed me in a way, now they sadden me. Maybe in the past I had romanticized them, envying the simplicity of their lives, and perhaps mistaking that simplicity for something like purity. But now I see that those lives are so hard, that those people are often addicted to sniffing paint thinner, that they are sick and poor and malnurished and that because of caste they have little chance at anything better. I think of what really a human is. What is essential and what is conditioned and learned. I think of my privaledge, a disturbing thought because it leads to the sense of responsibility that I don't want to feel. Is the knowledge I have access to meaningless unless used, useless unless given meaning through action. Up until now I've followed a path of personal interests that have led to enjoyable insights and realizations, shifted how I see the world and myself, but it all seems vaguely masterbatory, ethereal and selfish. But my instinct now is equally as selfish- to somehow buy a house, to make it my home, to grow a garden and write and read and be active and healthy and eventually to have a family. This is instinct and I think the trick will be to figure out a vocation that allows for this, that will benefit myself and others. Hopefully with the right combination of dedication, practice, intention, and some luck, writing will be this vocation.

P.S. Kristin's obsessions that I wrote about in the last post are only the ones that were funny to me and which when juxtiposed against mine exagerated them. I realize this may have made her seem infantile. The truth is she has shared many more mature, sensitive and thoughtful insights and observations about her experiences than I have had myself. Her compassion and open- heartedness constantly humbles and sometimes embarasses me.

Kristin's obsessions so far: dinosaur-like water buffaloes, sleeping dogs, baby goats, ants, the state of her motions.

Liam's obsessions so far: Detesting groups of young Indian men, how they stare with that dull idiotic and partially sinister look, like a deranged child just come down from a sugar high. What the hell is wrong with them, there are foreigners everywhere? I sum it up to partial retardation due to being fed chai and biscuits as babies and breathing this shit-air all their lives. How trashed India is, and how it seems to be getting more difficult to sift through the trash to find the charm. How things really don't need to be quite so chaotic, dangerous, inefficient and dirty, and that all it would take to improve this country is local government that exists at least fractionally for the benefit of the people and that is just a bit less corrupt. How the magnificent economic development that India is enjoying has only produced one million call center and technology campus jobs, and that it is these one million educated upper middle class people who are enjoying this development, and that really its not magnificent at all, and leaves over a billion others uneducated, sick, and suffering from greater pollution. How I cannot stand modern Indian aesthetic- cheap and flashy, which just looks cheap and stupid.How I love colonial era aesthetic- elegant, grand, airy, not retarded.

The bright side. Last night we attended a sublime sitar concert at the beautiful old Ganges view hotel. The instruments were mercifully unamplified. We watched my friend Joe support his Guruji in what was Joe's first performance. Three years ago I listened as he practiced for the first time the raag that he and his Guru performed last evening. It was truly amazing to see how far he has come in only three years. The sitar takes a lifetime to master. At one point in the concert Dr. Goswami broke a string in the midst of the most intense section of the composition and Joe, red-faced and smiling self-depricatingly, kept it going while his master changed strings.

Last night after discovering that the only two doctors that have international clinics in Varanasi are on leave I went to an Indian doctor at the hospital that is recommended by lonely planet and dubbed a reliable modern private hospital. After being told to come back an hour and a half later I finally saw the doctor. The visit lasted five minutes. I told him my symptoms and he didn't even look at my throat or take my pulse or temperature before prescribing Lovofloxin- an antibiotic that I was to take once a day for only two days. I know that no American doctor would recommend antibiotics for such a short time, so after some effort I convinced him that I needed the prescription for at least five days. After that interaction I was weary and before taking the pills I looked them up online. Apparently in the U.S. there are a number of class action lawsuits against the particular type I was prescribed and that out of all antibiotics it has the most negative interactions with other drugs- even herbal remedies, of which I have been taking many- the most severe and common side effects, and the most contraindications. I felt like India was conspiring against me.
So today I went to visit Varanasi's fixer, the Shanti-gangster, Nawal-ji. The man is an oasis. He recommended the best doctor in Varanasi who works in a little neighborhood clinic that is only distinguished from the other houses by a sign in Hindi script reading Vidhya clinic. After watching his nurse, a homely middle aged women in a sari with a mouth full of crooked hill-billy esque teeth, wipe gynacological clamps on the tapestry hanging before his doorway, I wondered what I was getting myself into. But within seconds of his presence I knew I was in good, if not dirty, hands. Dr. Bhanu is earnest and knowledgeable and listened intently to the story of my ordeal up until him. He explained exactly why the other antibiotics where wrong and why the new one he prescribed me was correct, he recommended that I continue taking ayurvedic medicine for my stomach, he even looked in my mouth. Anyhow, six dollars later I have five days worth of the proper medicine and already the world is a better place.

A strange thing has been happening to me. I have been dizzied by storms of dejavu, but not from the last time I was here. Its almost visionary. I'll be squatting on the toilet or riding on a bicycle rickshaw and suddenly a certain deep humming tone of feeling will overwhelm me and vivid images of Indian life here in Varanasi, images that I have not experienced, that seem like from a dream, will pass through my mind. I really don't know what to make of it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

That reminds me. Kristin ordered apple pie in honor of Thanksgiving. After eating half of it she got to a section blue with mold.

When healthy, India can be like a marvelously intricate and endless set piece designed just for your mind expanding pleasure. But when sick, India is a hell realm, a bad dream that you cannot wake up from. Right now for me it is the latter. I have a throat infection that has swelled my glands to the size of golf balls and kept me feverish for three days now. And last night I came down with another bought of food sickness. This is some crazy Karma. In 11 months of previous India and Asia travels I've been sick only twice. Already on this trip I've been sick for 2/3 of the time. Last night I was beset with abstract hallucinatory fever dreams that I could barely wake from. Indian's were casting strange energetic squares over my body and no matter how many I struggled to brake through into waking there were always more until some unconscious physical force in my body forced me out of bed and outside to the bathroom. After a brief reprieve sitting out in the cold of night I returned to my bed shivering to do battle again. I need to see a doctor. I've never wanted to ditch a journey early and go home, but this is too much. I'm longing for dependable food and water, it is a struggle to see anything positively. I want a bed that is not stuffed with hay and splotched with mold, a room where the walls are not stained with mildew, a kitchen that doesn't have a drain connected to the toilet making it smell like shit. I want my parents and my sisters and all things good and familiar and healthy.

India just seems retarded now. I was watching children at recess at the Hindu School across from our flat. They were doing yoga for PE. But there yoga was retarded. They would jerk into the most ridiculous positions, bounce in their stretch, and then their teacher would strut over and lift them into an even more preposterous position until they were quickly buckled to the point of pain and had to rapidly untangle and flail onto the ground. All with a smile of course. Stupid. It also seems like every other conversation that Indians have with one another (in particular the poor) is an animated argument. I am in the midst of the uneducated struggling poor sick masses and I want out.

This may all change once I am well again. I hope so.

We are in Delhi and its cold, unbelievably cold compared with the south, and I am shivering and so grateful for it. Its probably about 60 degrees. Today Kristin and I went wading through the madness of the paharganj bazaar and bought beautiful wool scarves and shawls for peanuts. Bali boiled my brains.

Yesterday when we arrived in Delhi and walked through the chaotic bazaar to find our room, Kristin was wide eyed, giddy, and said she felt like she was tripping. We are in another world, this is what we left Bali early for.

I'll finish this later when the Aussy babbling on skype next to me shuts the hell up so I can think.

Ok, I'm back now at another internet cafe. The Aussy babbling was so inane as to be astonishing and I couldn't turn my mind from it. I think the last part I heard went like this, "Uhhhh, huuuuh... what can I talk about... oh, is Lassie still makin that great popcorn? Well never mind, I could just ask her that when I phone her... I think something is wrong with my eye" and he pulls his eyelid open in front of the camera so the room full of people on the other end can see. Enough.

Last night we did something that I've wanted to do since my first trip to India. We went to the tomb of the 13th century Sufi saint, Hazrat Nizzamuddin on a Thursday night, the holiest night for sufis. We wound our way through a labyrinthine Muslim ghetto. Kristin, in an attempt at modesty and out of respect for Muslim custom, put a shawl over her head, but the shall was nearly sheer and luminous white, only makking her appear more beautiful and radiant than usual. I quickly bought a little round Muslim hat and a green muslim scarf. We played sufi for the rest of the night. After winding through alleys lined with crumpled beggars and stalls selling perfumed garlands of roses and iridescent tapestries to place upon the tomb, we emerged into the courtyard of the Dargha. For an hour we observed the organism that is the dharga. Inside the ornate pillared and domed building that housed the sepulchre, the hundreds of years of accumulated devotion seemed to coalesce into something tangible, to charge the air with a subtle humming energy that entered me and hummed within me. Even now when I am a generally less romanticizing and more critical person, now when I cannot help but to at least partially reduce things down to quasi-material causes, or at least functions, a recognizeable energy was palpable and affecting.

At 9:00 the troop of Quwalli singers arrived and set up their harmoniums and drums. Lining both sides of the Quwalli singers was a mixture of rich non-musilm Delhites, weary robe swathed and soft eyed dervishes, a rowdy perpetually tussling gang of street urchins, western tourists, and the majority- muslim men and women of all ages and social standings.

The Lead Quwalli singers where a pair of fat brothers. The oldest and the leader of the troop crooned with a low softly horse voice that seemed to fall out of a his fat sloppy-lipped, bettle rotted and mostly toothless mouth to slither across the cold marble ground so that I had to reach for it with my ears. The voice of the younger brother soared and as I listened to his wailing solos I followed his eyes and his raised hands into the sky.

The real treat for me though was to see how much Kristin loved it all. The Quwalli singin, the people bowed and crying with devotion, the power of the tomb and the multivalent and unimaginable swirl of life around it and really all of India, resonated in her heart. She is high off India, all her senses are piqued and her mind is sparkling with the formation of new synapses frantically trying to make sense of this new world.

As for me, I realize now that those synapses are already built and strong, that the mesmerizing high that Kristin is experiencing is no longer something I can experience. It was fascinating and satisfying to watch India Liam fluoresce into being so quickly. Navigating this world is Instinct now. All my tools have come back- the head bobble, the snatches of Hindy, the nuanced demeanor that is one part casual self-possession and many parts learned nuanced subtle reactions to the chaos that spatters constantly over you like hot grease when water has been thrown in. A subtle armor. And now all these tools are being resharpened, hardening again, and its all happening as naturally as muscles growing and repairing themselves after a work out. This is not to say that I am not exhausted from this work-out. I am looking forward to a break, to a home, and to a routine. We leave for Varanasi tomorrow night by overnight train. There we will make a home and begin our work in the most chaotic, ancient, haunting, and amazing city in India, and in my experience, the world.

We are here in Chennai on our second full day in India. I think to myself "oh india" with a thin smile and the tone of exasperation. Even after Bali, India is truly another world. Little seems to have changed here over the last six years. The men still dress and strut and quaff their hair as if they had just popped out of a 1970's disco, there is still incessant honking, the urban areas look irreversibly trashed, and in the rural countryside, tar-black bodies clad only in breach clothes bend into hyper-green rice fields or stumble behind plows pulled by oxen.

Its been fun to watch Kristin's reaction to it all. She had her first truly Indian moment only minutes after stepping off the plane onto the tarmac. She fell behind me as I was boarding the shuttle, and when I looked back to see where she was I saw a fat old grandma with her eyes focused on the two inches of space between Kristin and the buss door.I knew what was going to happen and I watched it with a smile. After a few lumbering paces the grandma was at full speed with two grandkids in tow. Oh shit I thought to myself, just as the grandma rammed Kristin with her buddha belly, literally bouncing Kristin out of the way and hauling her pride up behind her. Kristin laughed about this episode as she has laughed about almost everything that makes India India- the men, the chaos, the utter decay, and the way that somehow everything seems to keep going working living.

We fly to Delhi tomorrow, then on to either Varanasi or Kathmandu. I am feeling a deep pull to settle into a routine of tabla practice and writing. I feel so much older now on this trip, I feel time speeding up, threatening to pass me by, and from this I feel the need to create and produce, to build something. For the first time I almost believe in the idea of progress. Travelling itself seems almost an obstacle before this need, but my job now will be to make it into part of this need. The story that I have been working on since my last India trip and which I have come here to finish, takes place here, so I tell myself that it is right that I should be here again to finish and edit it, to give it the Indian detail that is so inimitably Indian that it cannot even be imagined or partially remembered, it must be experienced freshly.

Before buying tickets that took us through Kuala Lampur, I wasn't sure in what country it was.

Australians, young and old, have an affinity for large hideous tribal tattoos on their forearms and calves, fake boobs, and faux-hawks. There should be a new category of aesthetic decripitude called Australtrash.

Most of the world wants to live like us, or at least to live how they think we live. They will achieve it, and when they do the natural world, not to mention the world's cultures, will be destroyed.

It seems obvious that the shift away from the strictures of tradition, to rebel into new ways of life, is seductive. This happened to America with the beats and then later with the hippies of the Woodstock era. But as naive and imperfect as those movements were, they were organic and grassroots and creative. The shift away from traditional culture that is happening in Asia, as far as I can see, is totally artificial, material, and is geared towards conforming humanity into a homogenized mass that will want and consume what a few giant homogenizing corporations tell them to. And the underlying 'bhav' or aesthetic mood that humanity is being formed into is that of a sleazy greasy club scene, with macho hyper self-aware/absorbed men and hyper-sexualized self aware/absorbed women.

Balineses as a whole are possibly the sweetest people on earth.

We will be in India in a few hours. India!

6/9 morning
Kristin sleeping in silk caccoon. Her face radiant with yesterdays sun and the nights humidity. She is so beautiful.
Gaggles of ducks roam the paddies, fattening on ripe tropical insects, to be smoked in a banana leaf.
I awake each morning to mad shouts, stamping and clapping of a rice farmer. Pacing the length of his paddy, he rustles a contraption of wire and bamboo, cans and lungis, warding of forces and creatures invisible to me.
Ducks spill over terraces loud and greedy for their own company. Walking over one another's backs, startled when they rise above their friends.

Kristin was fevering for two days in Amed. Amed is not worth its recommendations. Its an insanely hot and dry strip of over-priced and ostentatious bungalows along a dirty black sand beach. We showered in water that smelled of sewage in a bathroom built painstakingly with small white stones. Back to Ubud now, where 88 degrees with 90% humidity feels cool in comparison. Bali is expensive, beautiful, friendly, overhyped and over-touristed. But not without its jewels of experience. Two days ago Kristin and I took our motor-scooter into the mountains to one of the islands oldest temples. The temple is built around a spring where through crystal clear water you can see the spring welling through black swirling plums of sand. It happened to be the day of the biggest festival of the year so we joined hundreds of Balinese dressed in their most elegant ritual attire- ornately embroidered sarongs, shining sashes, and lacy shirts. The spring spills through carved fountains into a bathing pool. I dawned my sarong and jumped in with the pilgrims and plunged my head into the coolest cleanest water in bali as it gushed from the mouth of a stone lion. At first I felt I might be intruding, but as I looked around I was greeted only with smiles. After sitting and observing the growing crowd of bathers I took the plunge again. Tomorrow we will return to the spring when there will be less pilgrims and Kristin will take the plunge- the first time she was too shy and didn't have the proper attire.

We leave for India on the sixteenth of Nov, two weeks earlier than planned. We are sick of rich tourists and this oppressive heat. A few more days lounging in our rice paddy bungalow and then out of the frying pan and into the fire.