Travel Blog

The birthday blast radius is December 27^th +/- 2 days.  I have had the honor and privilege of meeting some of the finest human beings within this blast radius. We often meet people who share the same birthdays and, without fail, we are stunned at the coincidence.  Let’s put this into perspective.  There are roughly 6 billion people on earth and 365 days in a year. On average, this would yield 16,438,356 people who have the same birthday as you. 

Here I want to send out a Happy Birthday to all those within my radius:

Myla Yee

in NYC on 25th

Theresa in the LBC on 26th

Vicky in

Vienna

on 27th

Nikie in

Taipei

on 27th

Babs in LA on 27th

Erich in SF on 27th

Megan in SF on 27th

Chris in SF on 27th

Chris in

Houston

on 29th

So that’s 9 persons out of a possible 82,191,780 within this 5-day radius.  I will end this blog here because, obviously, I have a lot more people to meet. If you fall within this blast radius, email me.

Last night, I rounded up the more liberal thinking folks around

Kaohsiung

to partake in a local tradition: shrimp fishing.  It has been uncontested that this is a phenomenon unique to

Taiwan

. Thai mountain people eat stir-fried crickets. Xinjiang Chinese eat deep-fried scorpions.  Taiwanese people shrimp and then eat them.

The idea of shrimp fishing conjures images of shrimping boats a la Bubba Gump. Uh… no that exotic.  We walk up a concrete ramp into a light grey sheet metal warehouse of about 1000 square feet.  In the center there is a concrete pool of nebulous water where shrimp are allegedly farmed.  Twenty local men sit around on a variety of pink, grey, and green plastic-injected chairs with shrimping rods, smoking cigarettes, drinking Taiwan Beer™, and eating grilled shrimp. A bar characteristic of an 80’s dive bar in downtown LA was obviously shipped in crates and resurrected here.

Imagine this scene.  I, in my Pepe Jeans™ off-white sweater jacket, walk in with 4 fashionably dressed women toting handbags the likes of Fendi™, Gucci™ and LV™, each with Starbucks™ Vanilla Lattes in hand.  There goes the neighborhood.  I contemplated bringing out my ipod mini to play some down tempo music; but restrained myself to prevent inflicting psychological damage on the locals. One local later asked: “You folks from

Taipei

?”

We pick up shrimping poles lined up on the walls as if pool sticks, go to the blood stained mini-fridge full of chicken liver, and off we go. You have to first tie a line with 2 hooks onto the pole, then cut miniscule pieces of liver for bait.

A nice Taiwanese man stuck the entire end of the rod into the water to gauge the depth, and helped me adjust the bobber.  You then put the bait in the water and wait. The shrimp eat the liver, you eat the shrimp.  The food chain simplified.

We talked. We laughed. We took pictures like tourists.  We all caught shrimp, racked them onto a grill, and put them into the convenient oven at the facility and sent them all to shrimp hell. Then we ate them.  Yum.

To recover from this oxymoronic urban outdoor experience, we all went to the opening of a new lounge bar called Loft.  My new found friend Thomas meticulously designed every piece of furniture and décor over 6 months and finally opened to debut his artistic sense. We enjoyed a bottle Moet surrounded by purple velvet drapes, comfortably upholstered red couches and pillows, with down tempo music as background. It was another good school night in

Kaohsiung

. 

“I often feel like life is pointless. That’s why I want to have a kid… who will eventually hate me or not talk to me.” —–My friend Y, Circa 2005

This quote is absolutely brilliant. These 2 sentences concisely capture those moments that we have sometimes. Even the most optimistic have these moments. They just hide it better than most. So this blog is dedicated to those silent moments we have to ourselves: moments that are unbearably dark; moments that are excruciatingly us; moments that are undeniably human.

I believe that for the majority of us lucky few with relatively un-traumatic family lives, the root of this dark matter rests on one simple question: what the hell is this all about anyway? I do not want to mislead you to think that I have the answer to the meaning of life. I don’t. But one fact is certain: knowing that we’re not the only ones to have these moments sure does make me feel better. Therefore, I can only offer some thoughts as a nexus to all of our collective dark moments. You are not alone.

Too often we ask questions to which there are no answers. Yet we don’t have the innate capacity to stop ourselves from asking them. We have intelligence. We have opposable thumbs. We dig rocks out of the ground and build towers that touch the sky. We forge metal cylinders and hurl ourselves underneath the ground and across the globe. It’s just that… someone forgot to tell us why we were doing all of this!

This begs the question: why do we need someone to tell us in the first place? Why are we waiting for some external being, some random grand poobah to tell us the purpose to our lives? We don’t. As I see it: we have about 80 years to live on this earth. We spend too much time pondering the origin of our soul and its final destination after we die. Perhaps we should focus on the 80 years that we have here. Without further evidence, I for one believe the only reason to be here is for the experience.

I turn 34 this coming week. I’m not yet half way through my allocated 80 years and I feel like I’ve experienced so much living by this philosophy. I’m blessed with extremely creative friends to help me fill in experiences. I’ve learned to be less fearful of my dark side.

So my friend Y is right. Life is kind of pointless. But having a kid is an experience, and having your kid hate you or not talk to you is also an experience. That is, perhaps, the only point.

Tonight, I did something extraordinary.  There are truly few moments in life like this…the first crush, the first kiss, or the first …. uh… firework show in your pants.

About a month ago, my South African friend Pieter Vorster asked me to participate in Extreme Theater at a space called Mindful Phoenix here in

Kaohsiung

. An enterprising gentleman named Thomas Sebastian, an Australian, and lethally good looking, decided to open up a space for people to learn kung fu, tap dancing, salsa, and put on plays. Kung fu and tap dancing.  Who would have even had the gumption to put the two together?

So once every other month, they put on Extreme Theater.  The concept is that on a Friday night, 3 writers are invited and given three facts: (1) a person, (2) a place, and (3) a prop. These writers have 24 hours to write a play incorporating these three facts, get actors to rehearse and act out the play by 8pm the following evening. I reluctantly volunteered to act.

I had never done any stage work before, which is the main reason why I decided to venture into this unknown. The three facts in my play were (1) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, (2) a treacherous mountain range, and (3) a hot air balloon. Craig wrote the play, called “Tonight we devour the Wolves”. I played a hot air balloon captain, who is hired to take Charlie’s 9 month pregnant wife to look for him because he had freaked out about the impending baby, and took off with the guise of discovering the perfect yogurt covered chocolate balls.  The short of it is that Charlie get’s devoured by a pack of wolves, and I deliver a baby. My co-actress Erin did such a great job.  Her delight of the day was the opportunity to slap me across the face as part of the act. She REALLY got into it. I left with a rosy left cheek.  She left satisfied.

The story is unimportant.  What’s important about tonight was that I learned yet another valuable lesson. I pushed myself to do something I had never done before, and the growth was invaluable. I have a new found respect for actors.  To put yourself in front of people against every grain of entrenched social limitation, with the possibility of total embarrassment, is unfathomable.  Yet the thrill of the experience gave me a rush of adrenaline like that of the first firework show. You know what I mean.  I highly recommend the rush.  You’re stomach will never be as tightly knotted or as filled with a swarm of butterflies. You will open up parts of yourself that you never imagined to have existed before. Just for today, I was a thespian. 

I took a weekend trip to

Taipei

. My friend Bjack set up DJ Tasc to headline at a club called The Face on Saturday night. The club had a long runway, lit with red and white squares a la Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean video, with the exception that they didn’t light up as you step on them, as they do in the video. Here’s a piece of nostalgia:

“Billie Jean is not my lover
She’s just a girl who claims that I am the one
But the kid is not my son”

This nostalgia paints quite a frightening scenario, once you take a moment and realize the circumstances surrounding Michael’s statement. Ironically, the kid is most likely his girl, and the girl the kid’s mother. But I digress.

I stood behind the DJ booth with a bird’s eye view of the entire club, and quietly observed the ritualistic social movement, which is the basis of this blog today. Young adult males roam about with huffed egos, preparing themselves to approach attractive young adult females.  Each male armed with a barrage of one-liners, smooth come-ons and tried and tested conversation topics. The goal: to get some action.  The measure of success: to get some action. The young adult females move about with DEFCON 4 defensive mechanisms, with their frail egos ready to order launch codes in rejection of young adult males unworthy of their level of attractiveness. The goal: to find a suitable and dependable adult male to establish a life of love and happiness. The measure of success: to find a suitable and dependable adult male to establish a life of love and happiness. Such seemingly contrasting goals, yet both are co-dependent on the other’s existence to achieve it.  And this excludes considerations for sub-factors such as competition amongst the same gender.

True chaos theory at work.  The statistical permutations and combinations of relationships that can result from this chaos are mind boggling.  And yet, somehow it works.  Order within chaos, miraculously achieved. I watched the 300 or so males and females roaming about in a great social swarm, trying to find their personal spark of order.  And I think to myself: I’m too old for this. But as my

San Francisco

friends can attest – I do love the music so.

Many of us religiously watch animal behavior on the Discovery Channel. Yet we observe so little and have little understanding of our own kind. So a piece of unsolicited suggestion for an activity: Go out to a club.  Observe humans from the eyes of an extraterrestrial. Try approaching someone.  Try rejecting someone. But most importantly, try a martini.