I want to be a Mumbaiker!

Staying in one place has its rewards, I have been in Mumbai since the wee hours of March 5th. Getting more shots for the D.Lloyd book and dating a very young Air Hostess from Inidgo Air, Sweet Baby Jesus. Priyanka is beautiful. And has been miraculously off everyday since we met up. And man I could move here, dirty durty dur teee I am.
But yes I am still ready to come home, but somethings now says its not the right thing to do, I don't understand it, is she a sign to keep running being young, travelling? Hitting Thailand in the height of the season? Does that mean live now and don't stop? Could I possibly not get caught up again in some boring routine to kill the years away with? Like before. 5 years gone, money made, youth traded away. I only have so much left. Just got my last lump sum from AOL, $6000. Thanks. Our last dance ends in december with 5000 shares at 22, I have a year to wait to see if they ever go above 22 to give me the profit minus half for taxes? who knows? One thing I know is that I am coming back to India, and Priyanka and I are flying to the Kerala Beaches to see something together we have never seen!

nice one bernie

I am leaving one town for a neighboring town to catch a flight bacl to Bombay for a day shoot for D.Lloyd try to get more stuff, we overlooked, because of our alledged fugitive guide, Terrence. So I am strolling in the morning hours for a few snaps and a chai or something. My attention is caught by a dog shitting, but real strained and all, spined curled all ready for the snap, ya know. There is something hanging out of his ass, it appears to be snot. So he is strained and curled and gets his head back there and bites at it, you hear the front teeth gnash and he quickly spits it out. Why do I see this, so I go check it out, yes it's a about 2 and a half inches of a tape worm, shit. Can't really get this imagery out of my head, so I thought I'd share.

I am in Bombay again, or Mumbai, think Bombay sounds more romantic. The afternoon shot went well, it was a muslim holiday or hindi holiday yesterday so it was kind dead, I got everywhere in the slums across the street and on the most expensive land in Bombay, damn from slums to high stakes real estate, who'd guessed. So things went well. But a man should not tempt providence to often. Regardless, I went back today, and the water tower I climbed up with a dude that was actually a resident and a chaffuer for the Taj Mahal Hotel, was locked up. The guards were out in force, I was yelled out everywhere, got some great shots nonetheless, but after the last few, the security guards said the police are coming, and that they were yelling from way down the river from the slums. I had to run to catch up with a double decker bus to get out of there and off to the Kurla Station and back to the animity of the indian minions.

Speaking of close calls, the other day I hoped a train from Bandra to my hotel and was unable o get into a car, they seemed all full and I did not feel like pushing my way in, Mistake! I jumped into a Frist Class car with the ticket inspector. He takes my ticket and starts to write up a fine or something, and I find out that the tiket to ride First Class in frickin 340 Rs. compared to the 6 Rs ticket I had purchased. He loks all serious, and he had a buddy or two with him. So I at the next stop I (fairly Obviously) inched my way to the door and as the train started gaining speed hopped off. Fuck the fine. BS. caught another train put a towl on my head and that was that, kharma did kick in and I was unable to find my hotle for an hour.

So overall things are good. Ready to coe hom though, was ready a week ago. Bummed a little by that, but oh well. Music has been keeping my spirits high, and helps at high volumes to drowned out the traffic and yelling and noise of India when you want to be calm in the streets like them, or like a cow. Momma I'm coming home, Wish I had a Bitch to fuck, gonna git me one. See ya.

D.

fuckin india

India has a homosexual community and two of them found me, yesterday evening. very nice chaps, but a first for me in India. I am losing that loving feeling and already I am excited to return home and get on with my life in progress.

Today there was a big rally CITU in Siliguri so I sort of covered it, did the march and photographed the people went to the stadium and heard the speeches, they mentioned America in the speeches a lot, but the context was unknown to me, Hindu is like Greek to me.

I don't have a card reader or a computer with Adobe Bridge on it so photos can not be posted at this time. I am hanging out with a friend here for now, Depkrah a local kid I meet at a cafe, he is showing me the place to get 3 marsala dosa and 3 chais and a bottle water all for 50 Rs. ($1.25) amazing. If you hang around long enough in any town the prices drop 75% off the beaten pathes.

I am now wearing a Punjabi a Bengali long shirt like thing, its excellent. Two reasons, One is light and airy, and secondly and most importantly, you can wash it everyday and it dry in an hour. It is really hard to stay clean here, and I am learning the ways of the indians, because most of them are pretty clean and that is a tall order in these DIRTY ASS TOWNS.

Still have a cold been a few days, probably from the trains, long 1 ot 2.5 day journeys. The punjabi shirt double well as a hanky! The pollution is the toughest thing here in the cities and I am not really getting used to it, the last four days have been rough, GOA was a breeze compared to anywhere else in India.

Varanassi the spiritual capital of India was my downfall, health was great till that shit hole. It is a very busy large and real dirty tourist trap and the people are the least honest in India in my experiences so far in my few weeks here. People go there to die so take the hint people. The Hotel Elvis has an inn keeper named Haroon and he is really cool so if you go check it out, expensive friends but a great hotel and if you split a room they are $2 per night. The traffic and congestion in Varanassi makes New Dehli and Mumbai look like Ocean City Go-Cart Tracks. Shit was nuts there, by far the most exciting and deadly streets in India for me.

Can't wait to get back and make some art, and finish my house, Since the job ended with Dave Lloyd and the photo shooting through Manila, Bangkok and Mumbai, these have been the longest days of my life. This place makes you feel blessed in so many ways. In Mumbai we visited a mosque out in the water, down a long walkway 1 Km maybe and along the way, there were deformed beggars one after the other, Polio? All kinds of fucked up shit, legless etc. By the time you got to the Mosque you felt the most overwhelming humility, it could not have been more fitting of an entrance to a religious facility. And the beach water the mosque was perched in reaked like a broken unflushed but constantly used stadium toilet from 1963.

Don't get me wrong though I love India. The cities are tough but the system and how it goes on is magic, and all of life here is allowed to grow and form organically. It's the most accepting socitey I have ever witnessed in that sense. Dogs know more about the city than all the tourist. They cross the roads they get their dinners, they siesta in the streets, and people just go around them, they are usually left to live their own lives, so cool. Who does that? Also the cows are another parts of the community, they live in the cities and do as they please as well, crossing 6 lanes roads, nosing their ways into restaurants, sleeping on medians, stoops, and train tracks if a fence goes down. These two groups ( and many others, like the monkeys, etc.) have rights so to speak in India, they get to live their lives among the humans. Who does this? Indians do and that is cool! That is something the rest of the world could learn from, because as a westerner, we have refined and refined and refined our way of life like all the foods we all now deathly avoid for 100% ORGANIC! Life is hard and that is personified here on the outside in India, and for me back home its all inside, my pain is not in the streets or the exterior but in a compartment designed by my refined society and western social values, kept out of the way as not to slow the system down, kept to a minimum just to a POP POP POP here or there, in some shooting spree.

Somehow this paradox of a society works with minimal street violence. Feet get run over everyday and a sorry and or an ambulance is all that is needed. The roads are aggressive at times but without too much anger, I am not sure how this works, but I am slowly learning how to walk in the streets knowing if I am fairly alert and not to avoidant I will not be hurt. Not sure how to explain India, It is fun to photograph and colorful, the people are warm, in the midst of total chaos that they shrug off like the cows roaming free in the streets. I am learning the zen of a cow, and it is a fuckin hard road for me.

hanging in there in INDIA

Palolem

Still in Goa and made it to Palolem Beach, this seems to be where all the kids are partying. At a bar called Cafe del Mar. Packed. They even have a niteclub, club called Alpha Bar, where everyone wears headphones on account of all the new noise ordinaces all through the Goan state. Heard it is something to see.

I was welcomed with open arms at the Cafe Del Mar, I played pool with the head dudes or owners of shack lands, Saby and Blaze. And I met people from all over the world, the UK, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Australia, etc. I needed to drink alot to get the courage to sleep in my $3.75 dollar per night shit hole. Success.

The Paneer(cheese curd) is keeping me solid and the Palek(spinach) is keeping me strong, but yesterday afternoon I think I took a smash that expunged my criminal records. But healthy so far. Trying to figure out where to go next and I am lost really. Probably Dehli. Got a sleeper train ticket from Margoa to Dehli on Sunday, we'll see if I make it. Still unsure if North is the answer?

Ajuna Market

Well I pulled out of the nose dive, and with a shorned nut sack I have left Arambol. To look for India. A Bus ride to the Wednesday market i anjuna. Well the countryside is crawling with women, Indian women in particular. It seems the Female Infanticide of Bombay ran out of steam. The women are assertive sellers and fun to flirt with, but they will make you pay for it, trust me. I am still in search of the fullmoon party that is gonna happen tomorrow night somewhere??? shit! It aint in Vagator where I am now. The famous 9 Bar is empty, with proise of a crowd tomorrow night/ I dont know/ But my room is $5 so I can't cmplain, and the market was a scene! to be expereinced! Endless rows of colored sheets waving in the captain's breeze coming off the Arabian Sea, by the way he Euro Backpackers in this country are FUCKIN INCREDIBLE and if India isn't enough, they will be!!! See ya. Oh and that red on my forehead I got dotted, pretty cool. I dont know what it means though???

No Return to Indigeny

Sitting around a thousand year old Banyon Tree in Goa India, Checking ot the characters among the flat clearing in front fo the tree and a small idol of Shiva. I ball up the rest of the Hash from our roach, hold it over my head and place it in a small metal dish next to a gorgeous purple grape, at the foot of the statue. After a few days in Goa I am convinced there is no return to indigeny. I am now on my first day alone in India, and Arambol, my first stop in Goa is getting stale. So I wake on the 20th and shave my junk, I now have the balls of a 15 years. I use the goto chakrah in my pants, and a head full of dancing Thai Sugar Plums. India here I am...

Bangkok

hell yea...................I am on the hair pill now,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,BITCHES!!!!

UNEMPLOYABLE 8

Boogaloos Cafe, San Francisco

She is 'urban' cute. And she draws a heart around the total of my check. I start to think, just maybe she communicates in symbols. I am a suburbia guy, unaware, maybe this is how it goes down with these city folk? So I causally stare at the check on the table next to me, did she do the same for that guy too? Is the heart just her hospitality trademark? I can almost make it out, it appears to be another shape, his does not have the arches of the heart, but I can't be sure. Just as I re-focus for a second look the guy reconsiders the lie of his bill and refolds it tightly three or four times before replacing it on the table. The money hangs out through the folds, that is all I can see now. Shit. The dude lays his head back and closes his eyes while he waits for her to retrieve it and relieve him of his post. The waitress is in the kitchen taking a break, drinking tea. I turn and realize the average looking girl who I thought would eye me up is pregnant.

UNEMPLOYABLE 7

Condo Renovations are coming along swimmingly. Got a great contractor from Arlington, VA named Julio Perez, through a reliable reference, DD Thanks! His team is coming along. When I return I will manage an Ikea Kitchen and Cable Railing installation.

I am off to photograph and videograph Bangkok, Manila, Mumbia and all over India for a few weeks after a brief stint in San Francisco. I will be an assisant/co-photog for Dave Lloyd, collecting imagery for a book called, Beyond Growth for his company. Should prove to be a great learning experience. And push my career further away from Office Computer Graphic Design and closer to more creative work and Fine Art. My next blogs will come during my trip through the hostels and internet cafes of Asia. So the waiting has come to a close and progress is abound. Come Spring I should be out of Reston, Virginia forever, depending on if I can find a condo buyer.

Peace out.

UNEMPLOYABLE 6

Knee deep in the wreckage of my stalled life. With lots of time for sleeping and selling off all my acummulated possessions. I am chilling out developing interesting nuerosis'. It feels very productive and profitable at times. It even feels like legitimate work. And maybe it is. The gross profits are high but the net is really much more humble of a figure. More like me (minus the major attitude.)

After a blissful 2000 day stretch of gainful employment, I have been awakened from my sleep-trottened routine. And looking back, I have learned a few real-world tricks this time around, and this unemployment will be different, better, last longer, maybe even parlay into something like the life of an artist that doesn't grab ankles for 8 hours a day.

I am at Misha's Coffee House, RJ's favorite place, unless Blue Bottle has surpassed them, and on second thought they definitely have for me. With a Back-hoe and a Jack Hammer in the street right in front of the open air shack, Blue Bottle is still better. The expresso still managed a silent perfection. A smoothness that stopped the world and when I came to the city works guys were giving out earplugs. I declined with some sort of east coast gravity toward the negatory, but what a city! I say. I guess that is why its been called the most livable since the early teens of the 20th century.

But right now back in VA it's raining outside and the traffic is crawling all over the place from the mixing bowl to Silver Spring. So I am just waiting it out. Fielding questions about my possessions on the table in front of me. And wondering when the hell I will ever follow through and meet A.M. Wood again for a movie.

I am real excited about two new illustrations that have come to me lately for my vintage wood series. The first is the 'Death Hoax' illustrated with a smiling double-ended noose and will be followed by all those in participation. The second is the Impotent Blimp, this illustration is a bit fuzzy.

I have interviewed another contractor to help rebuild my suburban modern 70s condo. Things are looking good, this guy could be the one to finally free me from my nest on the east coast. Hopefully things will be wrapped up by March 11th and at 38 I can try again to relocate to a place with a pulse and maybe even start fucking things with a pulse again too, the martz vase with the surgical glove taped over the mouth and the middle finger pulled through the bottom and the moaning soundtrack just aren't cutting it. I could go on and on about my social life but I don't want to push you beyond boredom. This is just an illustration in reality to show how overdue the attention to myself has been. Maybe after denying my true-self these are the consequences. I don't know. I am just a small selfish man with a bit of talent, and like everyone else I have a bucket full of unrealized potential. This bucket will probably follow me to my grave. I think my key to failure thus far is not knowing what I want out of life or simply wanting it all. I gotta marinate on that for a while.

"Do not lead a life of quiet desperation." (Ed Korac from the GB Coffee Shop.)