I’m in Kathmandu and thinking of you. I visited the Swayambhunath temple this afternoon, up on its hill overlooking the valley. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and it opened me up in the way only real beauty can, cut through all the jaded traveler in me. I haven’t been home since we worked together a year ago – you know that. It will be time for me to return to San Francisco soon. But what I wanted to talk to you about today is the two little boys that accompanied me to the temple and back.

You know how it goes – they sort of attached themselves to me and the one with better English elected himself my guide. Which is fine; they were lovely kids, very bright and very entertaining and fun to play with. They especially appreciated when I made monkey noises to scare off the touts trying to sell me prayer flags and singing bows. So we went up the 365 steps, and I stood on the terrace at sunset and marveled at the completely splendid Stupa, and the panoramic view of this ancient Pagoda city being eaten by its own slum suburbs. When we began the long walk back from the temple, it was very dark. Kathmandu has blackouts for three hours every afternoon.

I knew it was coming. They were shy about it.

“Excuse me, can you buy me some milk?”

“No.”

“Some milk, only.”

“No, sorry. I know this one.” You too, my international friend, you know this hustle. The milk powder turns out to be strangely expensive, and the kids sell it back to the shopkeeper later.

Some chatting in Nepali among themselves. A few minutes later, “Some food?”

“You’re hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should go home. You are children, go home and ask your parents to feed you.” I  wanted so badly for the world to work this way.

“Okay… we need also kerosene.”

“Again, this is your parents’ job.”

“Kerosene is very expensive.”

“I know that.”

I must admit I don’t have your patience, Jenafir. I don’t have your lifetime of practice with compassion. Every day I try to give at least a smile to all the desperate people who ask me for help; most days I fail. It gets to me.

“Look. Are you my friends or are you beggars?”

“We are your friends!”

“Then stop begging from me.”

“Please help us. We are hungry.”

“That’s it. I’m leaving.” And I walked away. I sure showed them a lesson. It felt terrible.

I calmed myself, turned around, motioned them over. I asked them to sit with me on some steps as night fell. Unhealthy dogs wandered in the street, and a kerosene lantern glowed red inside the shack across the road. Still no power.

“Listen,” I began, “what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do?”

No answer.

“Do you want to, um, build buildings? Or be a policeman? How about flying an airplane, would you like that?”

It took a long time for him to answer. I had to repeat the question, give more examples.

“I want to be shopkeeper.”

“A shopkeeper! That’s great… but, are you sure? You sure you wouldn’t rather be an airplane pilot?”

“I don’t know how to fly an airplane.”

“No. But you can go to school and learn.”

A flash of a smile. That’s all I wanted. Just for a second I wanted him to believe that he could be whatever he wanted. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I wanted him to believe that.

“You can learn anything you want,” I pressed on, probably uselessly. “You can choose to be anything you want.”

Silence.

“So why do you choose to be a beggar?”

“I am not a beggar.”

“You keep asking me for things without offering anything in return. That makes you a beggar.”

Silence.

“Will your parents be angry that you did not get money from foreigners today?”

“No.”

“Do you do this every day?”

“No. Only it is finished school exams now. Sometimes we have holidays.”

And that was it. The two children chatted amongst themselves but wouldn’t speak to me further. I told him I was going if he didn’t want to talk to me. He wouldn’t meet my eye. Did I shame him? Did I go too far and crush that spark I hoped I saw?

I walked off into the gloom, over the unpaved unlit roads, dodging rickshaws and bicycles and scooters, with that same old fury. Furious with the world, with him, with myself for handling it so badly. Empty and opened and full of ache at the same time. Realizing that I know very little about communicating with children. Wondering what you would have done, my friend. Wondering, again and always, what might actually make a difference in their lives. Wounded to see a spirit so young already crushed. Wondering if they would ever burn like I was burning right that second. Beginning to cry in the dark.

If we just… all these people… all this energy… why can’t we live like this all the time? It’s the old vision, that 4:00 AM glimpse of utopia, surrounded by friends and new friends and peace among your kind which makes you forget that there are other kinds. It means something, it has to, and you’re sure that this dawn among all others represents a new beginning, if not for all humanity then at least for the people who were lucky enough to be there. But it’s never that simple. The party absolutely depends on temporary suspension of disbelief. For example: this party was in Bayview and the few local kids who turned up — black kids at a white party — they didn’t fit in so well. It was hard for many to agree when they rapped “fuck the PO-lice!” Not that we wanted the cops to show up, to be sure, but it’s just, it wasn’t, they weren’t…

The party is its own reality, that’s the seductive pleasure of it. It plays by its own rules and does not mix well with racial tension or economic complexities or genocide. At this party, I did not perform a poem about genocide. I’ve been working on one, based on my experiences in Cambodia. Genocide + Party = bummer, Naomi observed, and she was right, and I suddenly couldn’t explain to her what the hell I had been writing about and why I wanted to do a poem about PEOPLE FUCKING DYING at a party, other than the fact that this was intentionally a “happening” with lots of experimental art. I made out with her instead, which was absolutely a good idea.

And then the french toast was ready and Evan was on the decks playing the most amazing sunrise set, and this woman I’d never met named Molly was standing behind me giving me the most amazing massage. And many of the people I love were there, and I thought — yes. This is life. This is what I want.

It is. It is what I want. Moments like this, I live for them.

Except for riding across the desert on top of a truck. Or having a woman beam with pride as she shows me how her one goat she bought with the loan is now three, how she thinks her future will be better and how she suddenly believes that she is the one who can make it so. Or showing Wikipedia to an Indian journalist. Answering my young friend when she asked me what a polynomial is. Understanding something, finally, and writing it with passion, near to tears that I was able to get even a hundredth of what I felt onto the page. The party is a mere flirtation compared to everything beautiful that I’ve ever seen or done, every tiny spark I may have planted. Some of those sparks were very hard to strike, and many more times I utterly failed to make anything better at all, but I wanted to be there just the same, just to know. I have walked through a bombed-out city, and I am glad that I did, because that is just as real as this fabulous french toast.

There is the party, and there is the work. I defer to The Beatles here. “Sure we did lots of drugs,” said Harrison in an interview years later, “but we never let it get in the way of making music.” The party and the work. The things you do because the thrill of the moment propels you to, the aerial somersault in the free fall towards the crystal blue water and you are seven years old and nothing else matters; that kiss and watching 200 people show up and have a mad great time at a happening that I helped create; this is the flight of life. But there is also the work, the slow and much longer runway. It often takes immensely more planning, months or years, and sometimes you can’t plan at all and you were just lucky you were there to help. Even more often you don’t know if you helped at all. So we do the work. At our party was a physicist, a handful of doctors, a man designing a genome sequencer, several linguists, a kindergarten teacher, a therapist, a pair of international aid workers, a civil rights lawyer, and perhaps a future politician or two. Oh, and some artists, I gather. We were all there, and what we do when we are not there also makes us live.

The party and the work. They are the yin and yang, each could not exist without the other, and this is what I was trying to explain to Naomi messily that laughing morning. The party is a focus of intention, it is a coming together, and we desperately need that. But is it not the only thing. Now matter how glorious the dawn seems, the party will not branch out to save the world (and this is where the Merry Pranksters failed.)  Most people aren’t invited, for one thing. So we will go home and get some sleep and then get up to create the world we want to live in, because we have to. Because we want to. The same thing that drives us to want french toast with friends at dawn is the thing that lets us understand that the rubble of war is a travesty. And when we are willing to walk through that rubble — to stop imagining the rest of the world and see that it is real too, even the genocides — we see where our efforts are needed. I cannot see that throwing the best party ever (and it really was the best party ever) is any different, in spirit, from swabbing the infected eyes of Ethiopian children or campaigning for finance reform or being a foster parent or however it is that we each choose to take care of the rest of existence. Attending to either of these poles makes me weep equally that I could bring something good into the world, however meaningless or small. The party is never the work, and the work must be done, and sometimes the work kinda sucks. But we do it anyway. I must have both– I will fade away somehow without both. Both are the creation of a more marvelous existence.

Is this my life?

I’m finally back “home.” I finally have an apartment. I can now own more than I can fit into my backpack, and suddenly I have a great many jackets and an abundance of fresh memories. I unpack more books and try not to think of these objects as my life. My stuff is not me, I keep insisting. A friend of mine says he learned this very clearly when his house burned down. How marvelously zen. I can’t throw out my first girlfriend’s leftover lingerie.

Or my iPhone, which traps me. I’m secretly ashamed of it, not because of the geek lust I feel, but because of its semiotics. To the casual observer, it pegs me as exactly what I am. Is some part of me an iPhone?

Hence the Chinese grocer.

Not only is the produce cheaper, but I don’t recognize most of it. I stand in front of bushels of something leafy and green, and discover that I can’t even read the name. I like this. Behind me there are tentacled things on ice, and sea snails. I had an excellent plate of sea snails in back alley of Saigon, and some others steamed on a beach near Danang. Those two incidents are the extent of my associations.

Not so for my distant counterpart. Is there, I wonder, some Vietnamese kid who even now is returning home and going out with his friends? He grabs a plate of food, reveling in familiar tastes, and at the same time thinks: is this really me? This home cooking, is it my life?

Because he got home that afternoon and started pulling all his old familiars out of big nylon duffels. He finds his old clothes, and a familiar pair of shoes. Knickknacks. Some books. But what books? What knickknacks?

I have no idea, and this excites me tremendously.

Everyone gets my jokes here; everyone grew up on the same cartoons and more or less the same food. Qarly found fish balls in my fridge the other day and said, ewww. What? Everyone eats them in Korea. I think. I don’t really know. They have completely different stuff there. If I was there I’d have completely different stuff too. I’d read different books and watch different movies and my nightlife would run in different neon veins.

I might be someone else. Do I really want to keep unpacking?

TURN ON LIGHTS

You cannot see the light switch.

GROPE FOR SWITCH

You walk along the wall with your hands. Fortunately, there is nothing to trip over in your empty apartment.  You find a switch.

FLIP SWITCH

Nothing happens. Have you an account with Pacific Gas & Electric?

CALL PG&E

You have no phone service. Have you an account with AT&T?

EXIT APARTMENT

You are outside the building. Have you your keys?

YES DAMNIT

Just asking.

WALK TO CORNER STORE

You just moved to the neighborhood, so you don’t know where the corner store is.

WALK DOWNHILL

You walk two blocks and discover a light commercial neighborhood. There is a sign for “Last Chance Sundries”

ENTER STORE

You are in a cluttered little corner store. Cartons of surplus dog biscuits are stacked along one wall. The proprietor is a small but formidable troll woman.

ASK FOR CHANGE

The troll glares at you and says nothing.

BUY DOG BISCUITS

You don’t have a dog.

BUY THEM ANYWAY.

You hand over $9.67 for a carton of expired dog biscuits. This leaves you with $0.33 in change.

USE PAYPHONE

The payphone costs $0.35.

FIND PENNIES

There are no pennies here. The drunken gnome sleeping on the sidewalk probably picked up all the loose change.

OFFER BISCUIT

You wave the mouldy dog biscuit under the gnome’s nose. He blinks unsteadily, then snatches it out of your hands and wolfs it down. There are now crumbs in his beard.

ASK FOR TWO CENTS

The gnome growls at you. I think he’s hungover.

GIVE HIM ALL THE DAMN BISCUITS. I KNOW HE’S GOT TWO CENTS.

You give him your last biscuit. He wolfs it down, and walks unsteadily away, apparently satisfied. Something falls from his beard.

LOOK

It’s two pennies, of course.

CALL AT&T

You feed the change into the payphone and dial the operator, who directs your call to AT&T’s Muzak department. After a long time, you speak to a surly dwarf who agrees to set up service at your new address, if you bring to him the Ring of Zardoz.

AHHH!

Screaming at him doesn’t help.

GO HOME

You walk back up the hill to your apartment building. You notice that your car has been towed. Have you an Area J parking permit?

FUCK!

You wish.

GET PERMIT

You don’t know where to get it.

GOOGLE DMV

I see no internet here.

GO HOME

You close the door behind you in your new apartment. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Then there was a moment, or perhaps a period of my life, when I lost this. I shed the mysticism I had been raised in; I raged at its flaws and threw it out entirely. It bound me too much and I had to get rid of it. I no longer believed that I could will the world into existence. I realized that I had no idea how often streetlights mysteriously went out when I was not standing under them.

I remember a night shivering in my apartment like the newly sober.

Later, I sat across a wooden table in Arambul, Goa, with a slightly younger man. Arambol is an unreal place to begin with, a tropical fool’s paradise where everything is cheap if you’re white, including the ubiquitous hash we’d both been smoking. It was a warm, wavering sort of night in the tourist café on the beach.

The kid was telling me about how you can change the world with your mind. About how we don’t actually know what is and isn’t possible. He said sometimes feels this enormous, crazy power deep within himself, and if he could just tap that…

Look, I said, and I screwed up my face trying to get the phrasing right. He continued rolling a joint. Look— just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s real, ok? What you feel deep within yourself and what’s actually going on, in reality, are two very different things.

He looked at me sideways for a moment, then exhaled a cloud of smoke. That’s a strong statement, he said.

Yeah, I guess it is. It’s more than a statement, it’s metaphysics. It’s my best take on how the universe is put together. I’m saying that there’s an external universe, and we don’t have direct access to it. In fact, I think our access to it is rather limited. Eyes. Hands. Books full of secondhand experiences. We can’t really know so we make up stories to describe the patterns in the kaleidoscope.

But there’s a catch. The world is not entirely outside of our heads.

Marriage. Capitalism. “Tradition” and a “university.” Or even “culture,” which is nothing but ideas. You can tear the factory down, but until you change their minds, they’ll just build another factory. And of course, there was a time when I believed I could do anything. I believe that again, even though I know now it’s not true. I believe it because it brings my personal mythologies back into the world, and maybe that’s all I’m made of.

I’m happy being a contradiction, because none of us really make sense anyway. I’m an empiricist who can shape the world with his mind, and I will whisper to lovers that I can do anything.

The only trick is understanding what parts of the universe are and are not ideas. Buildings versus norms. Bullets versus treaties. Sexual oppression is just an idea until you get raped, but it’s ideas that need to be changed to prevent this. Meanwhile gravity really does work, and there’s nothing at all about DNA that doesn’t follow from Schrodinger’s equation. The trick, when solving a human problem, is to understand which parts of it are inside our heads, and which parts of it are outside.

I think this is a fundamental confusion of our age. I think those who would meditate on the abundance of the universe might find it more helpful to send out resumes. I think those who would smash the windows of Walmart might first want to ponder why Walmart even exists. I think this is the confusion of postmodernists who see everything as a narrative, who deride science as merely one version of an ever-shifting truth. And I think this is the error of scientists who can’t understand why a citizen votes for the man who tells the best story.

All of us live within a maze of stories about a solid world. Both are real.

I’ve seen the world and I’ve lost religion. I know that no single victory will save us. Also: no one ever does anything for completely selfless reasons, and it’s a mistake to think that they should. This is the only standard I think I can actually live up to, and it’s more honest anyway: saving the world is just too easy a way to feel good about yourself, to feel different and special, or to forget the girl who dumped you.

Nonetheless, I spent four hours yesterday afternoon calling voters for Barack Obama. I did not expect to feel good about it. I do not even really expect that it will make a difference. But it seems a bloodless sort of way to support the world I want to live in. Also – and this is the real reason – I was damn curious. About myself, mostly.

I’ve seen better and worse governments, and while they all seem sort of fucked, some are far more fucked than others. In the United States, no one is getting shot for their politics, and that’s not nothing. Not every country is like this. That is civilization, my friend. That and clean water. So it’s easy for me to believe that the system isn’t completely screwed. My toilet flushes. Seems like a minor thing, until you don’t have it and people start dying of cholera. True story.

I don’t need people to believe. I don’t believe myself. I just want a president who at least talks about sustainable energy and universal health care. I don’t give a shit that the guy’s charismatic, other than the fact that it’s an asset in his game. I just want to live in a certain world, and I think that Obama will bring us closer to it. Fun fact: while Obama’s domestic support is around 50%, something like 80% of world citizens want him to be president. Curious, isn’t it?

So I stepped into the system and made those calls, because I wonder just how far within the status quo it’s worth working. And I wonder how I’ll feel about participating in utterly mainstream politics, the CNN circus. I called voters in Nevada and tried to convince them to vote for Barack Obama, and I did it mostly because I wanted to see how I felt about myself at the end of the day.

This made me somewhat reckless on the phone. And that made me real, because I could say whatever the hell I wanted. I’m still working out what that is.

In the West-African country of Mali, the staple food is rice, which has a husk that must be removed before eating. The women do this work, manually, by using large mortars and wooden pestles. It takes hours to prepare a single meal this way.

There are other examples.

In Dakar I went to the station to find out when the next train to Bamako ran. There was no posted schedule; I had to ask around for the station manager, who shrugged and told me, “Sunday night, maybe monday,” and refused to get any more specific than that. I could have shown up at the station with my baggage on a Sunday afternoon and waited 18 hours. This is what the Senegalese do. In a developed country I would have arrived fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure; in a developed country I would have been able to check the schedule online. Just catching a train could have taken up an entire day of my life in Africa.

So I took the bus. The bus had no glass in the windows, and when we hit the unpaved section of road near the border, the tires kicked up dust which covered all the passengers in red clay. Luckily, we did not break down. On my taxi journey from Chinguetti to Nouakchott in Mauritania we had six flat tires, because the right-front wheel was out of alignment. It was probably out of alignment because no one had the cash to repair it at the time.

In India I foolishly showed up at the hardware store at the posted opening hours. It wasn’t open, and when I inquired of the people within they just shrugged and told me to wait. In Jakarta all but the most expensive shops seemed to hold random opening hours; sometimes they would be open late into the night as the owners ate dinner, played with their children on the market floor, or drank warm Bintang beer on cheap wooden tables. At other times no one would show up all day.

Where there are no phones you can’t even call to check if the market is open before you haul your donkey fifty kilometers to sell your vegetables.

In Jamaica they laugh at the very idea of a schedule.

In Morocco they say that a man who hurries has one foot in the grave.

It’s a nice way to live. It’s an unhurried, slower, simpler life. It’s something endlessly idolized, universally craved by the overworked American (and yes, Americans really do work more and longer hours than those lazy Europeans.) Being unhurried and unserious about work is a lovely way to live, unless you actually need to get something done.

Building a house. Building a hospital and performing the surgeries. Making a movie. Heading to the dry cleaners, the bank, the post office, and your 4:00 all on the same day. Getting anywhere on time, ever. Trusting that the power will be on. Trusting that your cheaply-made motorbike won’t suddenly seize in the monsoon humidity.

The modern world is a clockwork. We built it, then forgot that we did. We have machines, we have systems, we have telecommunications which eliminate the need for transport, and we have transport that works flawlessly when we can’t eliminate it. We have opening hours that matter and schedules we take seriously. We have to-do lists and subdivided days in a hundred productive pieces. In Africa, they’re still hitting rice with sticks. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it does make them poor.

I am about to run away for the weekend with some friends to play with fire art and motorcycles. There will be no ball games, fireworks, or kegs for me. There will be no Janet Jackson, no proud Amerfican Eagle, no barbecues, and no flags. I just never could connect with the symbols of the American Good Life. We do have propane, admittedly, but we have 800 pounds of it. We’re running a thing we built called 2piR, a sort of interactive magic platform. Standing on it, you can direct huge gouts of flame from 16 nozzles ranged around you in a 50 foot diameter circle. This is what we do for fun. This is our little piece of the future we’re building for ourselves — not the hardware, but the fact that we built it.

I am, I suppose, an American. I had the good fortune to be born a citizen of the United States, yet grow up elsewhere. My Canadian roots give me just enough perspective, I think, to see that I never want to wave a flag for any country.

Everybody has to belong somewhere, but we shouldn’t take that too seriously. I believe in identity, but not nations. I believe in humanity, but not patriots. I believe in creating your own culture instead of waiting for someone to tell you what to believe in.

So instead of celebrating this great nation — and it is a great nation, I’ve traveled enough to know that — instead of celebrating the symbol, I am going to go enjoy the freedoms that it took me years to understand, and try to create the future as best as I can envision it. This weekend, my vision of the future, my idea of fun, my impossibly non-consumer creation, includes fire art and motorcycles.

Aiesha finally asked me what the flavor on the meat was and I pointed to the bottles on her dirt floor. I’d scoured the town for condiments and managed to assemble a vinegar-chili-sugar marinade. She seemed incredulous. “There’s a whole bottle of vinegar in this meal!” she confided to a friend. Expensive, at least for Ghourma-Rharous, a town of mud houses for 3000 people on the edge of the Sahara desert.

The only other white person in town was my friend Rebecca, who was devouring the gourmet meal with an exquisite expression. Such subtlety of flavor, she seemed to be saying to me as she tore into her brochette. Such delicious fresh food – I’d hand carried the mangoes from 200km away, and we’d had to ask around to buy the tomatoes, like contraband goods. Such a feat of culinary invention in the most trying of circumstances. Such artful cooking. Such– refinement!

And the Africans were having none of it, munching on this ingenious masterpiece like it was nothing special.

Flash forward to the dark wood table of a modern penthouse. I could never afford to live here, but my friend can. The floor is marble. The wine is unpronounceable. It’s good. I like the taste. He’s spent years studying wine. This is a bottle of something expensive.

I am quite sure it’s lost on me.

I stare at the half bottle and wonder at the pleasures of his life, if I could only learn to appreciate them. Once I thought wine snobbery pretentious. Maybe it still is, but now I understand that the things you love are learned.

And yet I still have the urge to cook sophisticated trifles for my friend Baba in his mud-walled home. But be clear: this is not about guilt. This is not about affluence. This is not about pity on those who can’t afford the good things in life. That’s completely ridiculous. Drink your wine. Enjoy your food. I’ve seen Tamils dig into beautiful soft paratha, Songhai men wolf down steaming plates of liver and onions, Russians gobble up caviar. It’s hard for me not to like my pleasures complex, but every art has its own perfection.