From a30c790edea652494e7481f6798047a3bc1fd4ea Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net>
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2023 13:43:36 -0500
Subject: added a backup of old pages that are no longer live

---
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.amp     | 173 +++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.html    | 331 ++++++++++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.txt     |  10 +
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.amp   | 183 +++++++++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.html  | 338 ++++++++++++++++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.txt   |  27 ++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.amp  | 189 +++++++++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.html | 342 ++++++++++++++++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.txt  |  35 ++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.amp     | 184 +++++++++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.html    | 339 ++++++++++++++++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.txt     |  29 ++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.amp | 187 +++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.html            | 341 ++++++++++++++++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.txt |  33 ++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.amp       | 187 +++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.html      | 341 ++++++++++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt       |  31 ++
 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/index.html         | 125 ++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.amp        | 185 +++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.html       | 431 +++++++++++++++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.txt        |  76 ++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.amp | 190 +++++++++
 .../2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.html        | 343 ++++++++++++++++
 .../jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt |  37 ++
 25 files changed, 4687 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.txt
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.txt
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.txt
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.txt
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.txt
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/index.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.txt
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.amp
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.html
 create mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt

(limited to 'bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01')

diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.amp
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1cd1689
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.amp
@@ -0,0 +1,173 @@
+
+
+<!doctype html>
+<html amp lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta charset="utf-8">
+<title>Are You Amplified to Rock?</title>
+<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock">
+    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1">
+    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock">
+    <meta name="twitter:description" content="Happy New Year, 2006, from luxagraf"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:title" content="Are You Amplified to Rock?"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:site" content="@luxagraf"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:domain" content="luxagraf"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:image:src" content="https://images.luxagraf.net/post-images/2008/bangkokriver.jpg"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@luxagraf"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:site:id" content="9469062">
+    <meta name="twitter:creator:id" content="9469062">
+    <meta name="twitter:description" content=""/>
+
+    <meta name="geo.placename" content="Bangkok, Thailand"> 
+    <meta name="geo.region" content="TH-None">
+    <meta property="og:type" content="article" />
+    <meta property="og:title" content="Are You Amplified to Rock?" />
+    <meta property="og:url" content="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock" />
+    <meta property="og:description" content="Happy New Year, 2006, from luxagraf" />
+    <meta property="article:published_time" content="2006-01-01T18:37:48" />
+    <meta property="article:author" content="Luxagraf" />
+    <meta property="og:site_name" content="Luxagraf" />
+    <meta property="og:image" content="https://images.luxagraf.net/post-images/2008/bangkokriver.jpg" />
+    <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />
+
+
+<script type="application/ld+json">
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+    "datePublished": "2006-01-01T18:37:48",
+    "author": {
+        "@type": "Person",
+        "name": "Scott Gilbertson"
+    },
+    "publisher": {
+        "@type": "Person",
+        "name": "Scott Gilbertson"
+        "logo": {
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+<style amp-custom>
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+    font-size: 1rem;
+    line-height: 1.73;
+    font-family: Georgia, serif;
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+    font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
+    max-width: 60em;
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+}
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+    max-width: 60em;
+    margin: 0 auto;
+}
+main footer {
+    text-align: right;
+}
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+}
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+    text-transform: uppercase;
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+blockquote * strong {
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+    border: none;
+    border-bottom: 0.0625rem dotted #ccc;
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+</style>
+<style>body {opacity: 0}</style><noscript><style>body {opacity: 1}</style></noscript>
+<script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<nav>
+<a href="https://luxagraf.net/">
+luxagraf</a>
+</nav>
+
+<main class="h-entry">
+    <article class="h-entry hentry post--article" itemscope itemType="http://schema.org/Article">
+            <header id="header" class="post--header ">
+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Are You Amplified to&nbsp;Rock?</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-01T18:37:48" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>1, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
+                <aside class="p-location h-adr adr post--location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <span class="p-region">Bangkok</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand">Thailand</a>
+                </aside>
+            </header>
+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p class="pull-quote">"Are you amplified to rock?<br/>Are you hoping for a contact?<br/>I’ll be with you<br/>without you<br/>again"<br/>- <cite>Robert Pollard</cite></p>
+<p><break>
+<span class="drop">H</span>appy New Year from luxagraf. I hope everyone had a wonderful and semi-safe New Years Eve. I will be back to traveling and doing my usual, once-a-week-or-so postings again in the very near future, stay tuned.</break></p>
+        </div>
+        </article>
+</main>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..17c49f6
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+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.html
@@ -0,0 +1,331 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html 
+class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
+    
+<head>
+    <title>Are You Amplified To Rock? - by Scott Gilbertson</title>
+    <meta charset="utf-8">
+    <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
+    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
+    <meta name="description" 
+          content="Happy New Year, 2006, from luxagraf">
+    <meta name="author" content="Scott Gilbertson">
+    <link rel="alternate" 
+          type="application/rss+xml" 
+          title="Luxagraf RSS feed"
+          href="https://luxagraf.net/rss/">
+    <link rel="stylesheet" 
+                              href="/media/screenv9.css" 
+          media="screen">
+    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/media/print.css" media="print" title="print" />
+    <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
+    <link rel="manifest" href="/manifest.json" /> 
+    <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="https://stats.luxagraf.net">
+    
+    <link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock" />
+    <meta name="ICBM" content="13.761790973148347, 100.4934453824343" />
+    <meta name="geo.position" content="13.761790973148347; 100.4934453824343" />
+    <meta name="geo.placename" content="Bangkok, Thailand"> 
+    <meta name="geo.region" content="-">
+    <meta property="og:type" content="article" />
+    <meta property="og:title" content="Are You Amplified to Rock?" />
+    <meta property="og:url" content="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock" />
+    <meta property="og:description" content="Happy New Year, 2006, from luxagraf" />
+    <meta property="article:published_time" content="2006-01-01T18:37:48" />
+    <meta property="article:author" content="Scott Gilbertson" />
+    <meta property="og:site_name" content="Luxagraf" />
+    <meta property="og:image" content="/media/images/post-images/2008/bangkokriver.jpg" />
+    <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />
+    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:description" content="Happy New Year, 2006, from luxagraf"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:title" content="Are You Amplified to Rock?"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:site" content="@luxagraf"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:domain" content="luxagraf"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:image:src" content="/media/images/post-images/2008/bangkokriver.jpg"/>
+    <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@luxagraf"/>
+<script type="application/ld+json">
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+  },
+  "headline": "Are You Amplified to Rock?",
+  "datePublished": "2006-01-01T18:37:48+04:00",
+  "dateModified": "2006-01-01T18:37:48+04:00",
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+    "name": "Scott Gilbertson"
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+   "publisher": {
+    "@type": "Organization",
+    "name": "Luxagraf",
+    "logo": {
+      "@type": "ImageObject",
+      "url": "https://luxagraf.net/media/img/logo-white.jpg"
+    }
+  },
+  "description": "Happy New Year, 2006, from luxagraf"
+}
+</script>
+
+</head>
+<body >
+    <div class="wrapper" id="wrapper">
+    <div class="header-wrapper">
+        <header class="site-banner">
+            <div id="logo">
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+                <span class="sitesubtitle">Walk Slowly</span>
+            </div>
+            <nav>
+                <ul>
+                    <li><a href="/jrnl/" title="Stories of life on the road.">Jrnl</a> &amp; <a href="/field-notes/" title="Short stories, snapshots of daily life on the road.">Field Notes</a></li>
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+                    <li><a href="/about" title="About Scott">About</a></li>
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+    </ol>
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+    		
+    <main>
+    <article class="h-entry hentry entry-content content" itemscope itemType="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">
+            <header id="header" class="post-header ">
+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post-title" itemprop="headline">Are You Amplified to Rock?</h1>
+                
+                <div class="post-linewrapper">
+                <div class="p-location h-adr adr post-location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <h3 class="h-adr" itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"><span class="p-region" itemprop="addressRegion">Bangkok</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand"><span itemprop="addressCountry">Thailand</span></a></h3>
+                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(13.761790973148347, 100.4934453824343, { type:'point', lat:'13.761790973148347', lon:'100.4934453824343'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
+                </div>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2006-01-01T18:37:48" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>1, 2006</span></time>
+                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
+                </div>
+            </header>
+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p class="pull-quote">&#8220;Are you amplified to rock?<br />Are you hoping for a contact?<br />I&#8217;ll be with you<br />without you<br />again&#8221;<br />- <cite>Robert Pollard</cite></p>
+
+<p><break>
+<span class="drop">H</span>appy New Year from luxagraf. I hope everyone had a wonderful and semi-safe New Years Eve. I will be back to traveling and doing my usual, once-a-week-or-so postings again in the very near future, stay tuned.</p></p>
+        </div>
+        
+        </article>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+Are You Amplified to Rock?
+==========================
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock>
+    Sunday, 01 January 2006
+
+<p class="pull-quote">"Are you amplified to rock?<br />Are you hoping for a contact?<br />I&#8217;ll be with you<br />without you<br />again"<br />- <cite>Robert Pollard</cite></p>
+<break>
+<span class="drop">H</span>appy New Year from luxagraf. I hope everyone had a wonderful and semi-safe New Years Eve. I will be back to traveling and doing my usual, once-a-week-or-so postings again in the very near future, stay tuned.</p>
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+            <header id="header" class="post--header ">
+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Brink of the&nbsp;Clouds</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-03T20:38:27" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>3, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
+                <aside class="p-location h-adr adr post--location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <span class="p-region">Bangkok</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand">Thailand</a>
+                </aside>
+            </header>
+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p><span class="drop">T</span>wo days after Christmas, I had just finished some internet business at the McBen Coffeehouse on Sukhumvit Soi 8, but I didn't yet feel like heading back to Khoasan Rd, so I took the sky train to Siam Square and walked over the Khlong Saen Saep canal to the Baiyoke Sky Hotel, which, as it proudly proclaims to anyone who will listen, is the tallest hotel in the world—not building mind you, I believe that honor goes to the Taipei 101 in Taiwan—the Baiyoke Sky is the tallest <em>hotel</em>. </p>
+<p>It can claim the tallest building in Bangkok though and indeed all of Thailand. It stands a singularly massive, circular structure jutting up into the Bangkok sky and looking up at it from the bridge over the canal gave me a mild feeling of vertigo, something that has always happened to me when gazing up at some great height. Strange but I have always experienced vertigo looking up at heights, never looking down from them. </p>
+<p><break>
+The Baiyoke Sky Hotel is circular and the revolving observation deck on the eighty-seventh floor slowly swivels around at a soaring height of three hundred meters and, though the Empire State building is taller than the Baiyoke (by eighty one meters), is not as dramatic from the top. The Baiyoke has sheer, architecturally unbroken sides, when you lean out you look straight down and, unlike the Empire State building which is surrounded by other high rises, the Baiyoke massively dwarfs everything else in the area, which makes it seem much higher than the Empire State Building. </break></p>
+<p>However, for me, the most amazing thing about the Baiyoke Sky Hotel is the elevator. Somehow, seemingly by bending the rules of physics, LG has managed to construct an elevator that ascends nearly three hundred meters in forty seconds and produces almost no discernible sense of motion. Not only is that faster than any elevator I've ever ridden in, but even while watching the city lights shrink toward my feet, I still could not convince myself that I was moving. The sensation was almost creepy as if the movement were staged; the elevator motionless and a fake background rolling by; my ears popping at the rapid change in height were the only tangible sense of motion I could feel. It was such an extraordinary experience that before I left I rode it twice more up and down, just to make sure that my mind wasn't playing tricks on me.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Bangkok Thailand Nightscape" height="150" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bangkoknightscape.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>The physics defying ride exited on the eighty fifth floor and from there I made my way up two flights of stairs to the observation deck. The Bangkok nightscape stretched out beneath me like radioactive paint flung on a black felt canvas. From such heights it is difficult to pick out individual people and even cars on the highways and overpasses, the streaking red taillights and the dirty, yellow-white headlights, the color of angel wings too long in the smoggy air, become one continuous river of light flowing amongst the glittering black rock of buildings. The deck creaked as it turned and the occasional thumps and bumps of the mismatched joints beneath the steel top were the only sounds as I glided around the hotel, which gave me the sensation of standing on a ballerina's shoulder as she turned a slow, continuous pirouette round the clouds. </p>
+<p>In those moments when the mechanisms of turning fell silent, the faint sounds of the city could be heard rising from below, nothing distinct, more like the hum of a computer when you walk in the room, or the white noise of your refrigerator droning that you don't notice until you're sitting there late at night in the silence of an empty and sleeping house where suddenly the sound of the coils and Freon become an almost deafening noise. So with the sound of Bangkok from a great height, a height from which even Celine could not piss, though apparently the metal grating, which makes a nice brace for long exposure night shots, is the result of a team of Norwegians who base jumped from the deck in 2000. I tried to find out if anyone had ever committed suicide from the deck, but no one would give me an answer. </p>
+<p><amp-img alt="" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/baiyokepillar.jpg" width="143"></amp-img>After having my fill of the heights I wandered down to the bar area two floors below the deck where supposedly the elevator ticket was good for a free drink, descending as I did into a candlelit darkness. Everyone seemed to be clearly out just as I arrived, but isn't that the way it always seems? I took a seat in one of the red vinyl chairs near the entrance just in front of a baluster that seemed to be imitating a telescope, starting small at the base and progressively growing out toward the ceiling, little circular shelves, a perfect matchbox race track complete with tubular florescent road lights that wound around, beads of blue light driving up the tiny path toward the ceiling. The tiny blue lights and a few candles were the only light in the bar. The darkness was occasionally punctuated by the lightning flashes of snap happy tourists at the window in front of the elevator apparently unaware of the limited range of such bulbs, but, sitting next to the window staring out at the city below the combined effect of the height and flashes of light gave me the feeling of sitting in some great stationary thunderhead, as if at any moment the wind might kick up and carry us westward dumping torrents of rain over the neighborhoods until finally we would dissipate over the South China Sea.</p>
+<p>As I sat in the lounge sipping whiskey from a crystal cordial glass which somewhat contrasted with the otherwise futuristic decor, I tried to calculate how long you would fall from this height. I'm not real great at math, but think you have about 12 seconds to regret your choice, or if you're Norwegian, to open your chute.</p>
+<p>"The city is a cathedral" writes James Salter, "its scent is dreams," and though he may have been referring to New York, his words ring true, perhaps to a lesser degree but true nevertheless, in every large city. Or maybe you just have to be a lover of cities to feel it. We seem to embrace the hive replicas built perhaps from memories embedded in our DNA; we feel safety in numbers, a desire to be close to one another, yet seek to find our own honey in the comb as it were. And so cities become our greatest cathedrals, redolent with our most venerable dreams reflected out of the darkness of our fears and nightmares. Perhaps this is why night in the city is so compelling—this mixture of dualities, the one place where we can see everything together and mingling. </p>
+<p>I always feel younger in cities, something about the city at night makes everything seem possible, the sound of the wheels on the concrete, the determined and purposeful stride of strangers around you on the sidewalks, everything seems to have its place in the city, it grows out of the darkness of night to bring light. Even in Bangkok as I walked to the Baiyoke Hotel I found myself thinking of New York and how much I miss it, particularly the sound of the wheels on sixth avenue in the rain, that wet hiss punctuated with splashes and the rain muted sound of horns; in October when it starts to turn cold and all you want to do is get off the street into somewhere warm with friends, but something makes you linger there on the street watching the endless glitter of lights and windows reflecting and refracting in some perpetual bouncing circle so that you can feel earth turning, as if the energy of its core were right beneath you.</p>
+        </div>
+        </article>
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+                
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+                    <h3 class="h-adr" itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"><span class="p-region" itemprop="addressRegion">Bangkok</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand"><span itemprop="addressCountry">Thailand</span></a></h3>
+                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(13.750921779579318, 100.54314135105552, { type:'point', lat:'13.750921779579318', lon:'100.54314135105552'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
+                </div>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2006-01-03T20:38:27" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>3, 2006</span></time>
+                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
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+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p><span class="drop">T</span>wo days after Christmas, I had just finished some internet business at the McBen Coffeehouse on Sukhumvit Soi 8, but I didn&#8217;t yet feel like heading back to Khoasan Rd, so I took the sky train to Siam Square and walked over the Khlong Saen Saep canal to the Baiyoke Sky Hotel, which, as it proudly proclaims to anyone who will listen, is the tallest hotel in the world&mdash;not building mind you, I believe that honor goes to the Taipei 101 in Taiwan&mdash;the Baiyoke Sky is the tallest <em>hotel</em>. </p>
+<p>It can claim the tallest building in Bangkok though and indeed all of Thailand. It stands a singularly massive, circular structure jutting up into the Bangkok sky and looking up at it from the bridge over the canal gave me a mild feeling of vertigo, something that has always happened to me when gazing up at some great height. Strange but I have always experienced vertigo looking up at heights, never looking down from them. </p>
+<p><break>
+The Baiyoke Sky Hotel is circular and the revolving observation deck on the eighty-seventh floor slowly swivels around at a soaring height of three hundred meters and, though the Empire State building is taller than the Baiyoke (by eighty one meters), is not as dramatic from the top. The Baiyoke has sheer, architecturally unbroken sides, when you lean out you look straight down and, unlike the Empire State building which is surrounded by other high rises, the Baiyoke massively dwarfs everything else in the area, which makes it seem much higher than the Empire State Building. </p>
+<p>However, for me, the most amazing thing about the Baiyoke Sky Hotel is the elevator. Somehow, seemingly by bending the rules of physics, LG has managed to construct an elevator that ascends nearly three hundred meters in forty seconds and produces almost no discernible sense of motion. Not only is that faster than any elevator I&#8217;ve ever ridden in, but even while watching the city lights shrink toward my feet, I still could not convince myself that I was moving. The sensation was almost creepy as if the movement were staged; the elevator motionless and a fake background rolling by; my ears popping at the rapid change in height were the only tangible sense of motion I could feel. It was such an extraordinary experience that before I left I rode it twice more up and down, just to make sure that my mind wasn&#8217;t playing tricks on me.</p>
+<p><img alt="Bangkok Thailand Nightscape" class="postpicright" height="150" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bangkoknightscape.jpg" width="200"/>The physics defying ride exited on the eighty fifth floor and from there I made my way up two flights of stairs to the observation deck. The Bangkok nightscape stretched out beneath me like radioactive paint flung on a black felt canvas. From such heights it is difficult to pick out individual people and even cars on the highways and overpasses, the streaking red taillights and the dirty, yellow-white headlights, the color of angel wings too long in the smoggy air, become one continuous river of light flowing amongst the glittering black rock of buildings. The deck creaked as it turned and the occasional thumps and bumps of the mismatched joints beneath the steel top were the only sounds as I glided around the hotel, which gave me the sensation of standing on a ballerina&#8217;s shoulder as she turned a slow, continuous pirouette round the clouds. </p>
+<p>In those moments when the mechanisms of turning fell silent, the faint sounds of the city could be heard rising from below, nothing distinct, more like the hum of a computer when you walk in the room, or the white noise of your refrigerator droning that you don&#8217;t notice until you&#8217;re sitting there late at night in the silence of an empty and sleeping house where suddenly the sound of the coils and Freon become an almost deafening noise. So with the sound of Bangkok from a great height, a height from which even Celine could not piss, though apparently the metal grating, which makes a nice brace for long exposure night shots, is the result of a team of Norwegians who base jumped from the deck in 2000. I tried to find out if anyone had ever committed suicide from the deck, but no one would give me an answer. </p>
+<p><img alt="" class="postpic" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/baiyokepillar.jpg" width="143"/>After having my fill of the heights I wandered down to the bar area two floors below the deck where supposedly the elevator ticket was good for a free drink, descending as I did into a candlelit darkness. Everyone seemed to be clearly out just as I arrived, but isn&#8217;t that the way it always seems? I took a seat in one of the red vinyl chairs near the entrance just in front of a baluster that seemed to be imitating a telescope, starting small at the base and progressively growing out toward the ceiling, little circular shelves, a perfect matchbox race track complete with tubular florescent road lights that wound around, beads of blue light driving up the tiny path toward the ceiling. The tiny blue lights and a few candles were the only light in the bar. The darkness was occasionally punctuated by the lightning flashes of snap happy tourists at the window in front of the elevator apparently unaware of the limited range of such bulbs, but, sitting next to the window staring out at the city below the combined effect of the height and flashes of light gave me the feeling of sitting in some great stationary thunderhead, as if at any moment the wind might kick up and carry us westward dumping torrents of rain over the neighborhoods until finally we would dissipate over the South China Sea.</p>
+<p>As I sat in the lounge sipping whiskey from a crystal cordial glass which somewhat contrasted with the otherwise futuristic decor, I tried to calculate how long you would fall from this height. I&#8217;m not real great at math, but think you have about 12 seconds to regret your choice, or if you&#8217;re Norwegian, to open your chute.</p>
+<p>&#8220;The city is a cathedral&#8221; writes James Salter, &#8220;its scent is dreams,&#8221; and though he may have been referring to New York, his words ring true, perhaps to a lesser degree but true nevertheless, in every large city. Or maybe you just have to be a lover of cities to feel it. We seem to embrace the hive replicas built perhaps from memories embedded in our DNA; we feel safety in numbers, a desire to be close to one another, yet seek to find our own honey in the comb as it were. And so cities become our greatest cathedrals, redolent with our most venerable dreams reflected out of the darkness of our fears and nightmares. Perhaps this is why night in the city is so compelling&mdash;this mixture of dualities, the one place where we can see everything together and mingling. </p>
+<p>I always feel younger in cities, something about the city at night makes everything seem possible, the sound of the wheels on the concrete, the determined and purposeful stride of strangers around you on the sidewalks, everything seems to have its place in the city, it grows out of the darkness of night to bring light. Even in Bangkok as I walked to the Baiyoke Hotel I found myself thinking of New York and how much I miss it, particularly the sound of the wheels on sixth avenue in the rain, that wet hiss punctuated with splashes and the rain muted sound of horns; in October when it starts to turn cold and all you want to do is get off the street into somewhere warm with friends, but something makes you linger there on the street watching the endless glitter of lights and windows reflecting and refracting in some perpetual bouncing circle so that you can feel earth turning, as if the energy of its core were right beneath you.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b9f80cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/brink-clouds.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+Brink of the Clouds
+===================
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/brink-clouds>
+    Tuesday, 03 January 2006
+
+<span class="drop">T</span>wo days after Christmas, I had just finished some internet business at the McBen Coffeehouse on Sukhumvit Soi 8, but I didn't yet feel like heading back to Khoasan Rd, so I took the sky train to Siam Square and walked over the Khlong Saen Saep canal to the Baiyoke Sky Hotel, which, as it proudly proclaims to anyone who will listen, is the tallest hotel in the world&mdash;not building mind you, I believe that honor goes to the Taipei 101 in Taiwan&mdash;the Baiyoke Sky is the tallest *hotel*. 
+
+It can claim the tallest building in Bangkok though and indeed all of Thailand. It stands a singularly massive, circular structure jutting up into the Bangkok sky and looking up at it from the bridge over the canal gave me a mild feeling of vertigo, something that has always happened to me when gazing up at some great height. Strange but I have always experienced vertigo looking up at heights, never looking down from them. 
+
+<break>
+The Baiyoke Sky Hotel is circular and the revolving observation deck on the eighty-seventh floor slowly swivels around at a soaring height of three hundred meters and, though the Empire State building is taller than the Baiyoke (by eighty one meters), is not as dramatic from the top. The Baiyoke has sheer, architecturally unbroken sides, when you lean out you look straight down and, unlike the Empire State building which is surrounded by other high rises, the Baiyoke massively dwarfs everything else in the area, which makes it seem much higher than the Empire State Building. 
+
+However, for me, the most amazing thing about the Baiyoke Sky Hotel is the elevator. Somehow, seemingly by bending the rules of physics, LG has managed to construct an elevator that ascends nearly three hundred meters in forty seconds and produces almost no discernible sense of motion. Not only is that faster than any elevator I've ever ridden in, but even while watching the city lights shrink toward my feet, I still could not convince myself that I was moving. The sensation was almost creepy as if the movement were staged; the elevator motionless and a fake background rolling by; my ears popping at the rapid change in height were the only tangible sense of motion I could feel. It was such an extraordinary experience that before I left I rode it twice more up and down, just to make sure that my mind wasn't playing tricks on me.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bangkoknightscape.jpg" width="200" height="150" class="postpicright" alt="Bangkok Thailand Nightscape" />The physics defying ride exited on the eighty fifth floor and from there I made my way up two flights of stairs to the observation deck. The Bangkok nightscape stretched out beneath me like radioactive paint flung on a black felt canvas. From such heights it is difficult to pick out individual people and even cars on the highways and overpasses, the streaking red taillights and the dirty, yellow-white headlights, the color of angel wings too long in the smoggy air, become one continuous river of light flowing amongst the glittering black rock of buildings. The deck creaked as it turned and the occasional thumps and bumps of the mismatched joints beneath the steel top were the only sounds as I glided around the hotel, which gave me the sensation of standing on a ballerina's shoulder as she turned a slow, continuous pirouette round the clouds. 
+
+In those moments when the mechanisms of turning fell silent, the faint sounds of the city could be heard rising from below, nothing distinct, more like the hum of a computer when you walk in the room, or the white noise of your refrigerator droning that you don't notice until you're sitting there late at night in the silence of an empty and sleeping house where suddenly the sound of the coils and Freon become an almost deafening noise. So with the sound of Bangkok from a great height, a height from which even Celine could not piss, though apparently the metal grating, which makes a nice brace for long exposure night shots, is the result of a team of Norwegians who base jumped from the deck in 2000. I tried to find out if anyone had ever committed suicide from the deck, but no one would give me an answer. 
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/baiyokepillar.jpg" width="143" height="200" class="postpic" alt="" />After having my fill of the heights I wandered down to the bar area two floors below the deck where supposedly the elevator ticket was good for a free drink, descending as I did into a candlelit darkness. Everyone seemed to be clearly out just as I arrived, but isn't that the way it always seems? I took a seat in one of the red vinyl chairs near the entrance just in front of a baluster that seemed to be imitating a telescope, starting small at the base and progressively growing out toward the ceiling, little circular shelves, a perfect matchbox race track complete with tubular florescent road lights that wound around, beads of blue light driving up the tiny path toward the ceiling. The tiny blue lights and a few candles were the only light in the bar. The darkness was occasionally punctuated by the lightning flashes of snap happy tourists at the window in front of the elevator apparently unaware of the limited range of such bulbs, but, sitting next to the window staring out at the city below the combined effect of the height and flashes of light gave me the feeling of sitting in some great stationary thunderhead, as if at any moment the wind might kick up and carry us westward dumping torrents of rain over the neighborhoods until finally we would dissipate over the South China Sea.
+
+As I sat in the lounge sipping whiskey from a crystal cordial glass which somewhat contrasted with the otherwise futuristic decor, I tried to calculate how long you would fall from this height. I'm not real great at math, but think you have about 12 seconds to regret your choice, or if you're Norwegian, to open your chute.
+
+"The city is a cathedral" writes James Salter, "its scent is dreams," and though he may have been referring to New York, his words ring true, perhaps to a lesser degree but true nevertheless, in every large city. Or maybe you just have to be a lover of cities to feel it. We seem to embrace the hive replicas built perhaps from memories embedded in our DNA; we feel safety in numbers, a desire to be close to one another, yet seek to find our own honey in the comb as it were. And so cities become our greatest cathedrals, redolent with our most venerable dreams reflected out of the darkness of our fears and nightmares. Perhaps this is why night in the city is so compelling&mdash;this mixture of dualities, the one place where we can see everything together and mingling. 
+
+I always feel younger in cities, something about the city at night makes everything seem possible, the sound of the wheels on the concrete, the determined and purposeful stride of strangers around you on the sidewalks, everything seems to have its place in the city, it grows out of the darkness of night to bring light. Even in Bangkok as I walked to the Baiyoke Hotel I found myself thinking of New York and how much I miss it, particularly the sound of the wheels on sixth avenue in the rain, that wet hiss punctuated with splashes and the rain muted sound of horns; in October when it starts to turn cold and all you want to do is get off the street into somewhere warm with friends, but something makes you linger there on the street watching the endless glitter of lights and windows reflecting and refracting in some perpetual bouncing circle so that you can feel earth turning, as if the energy of its core were right beneath you.
diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.amp
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a0b3a54
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.amp
@@ -0,0 +1,189 @@
+
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+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Buddha on the&nbsp;Bounty</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-05T18:43:03" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>5, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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+                    <span class="p-region">Bangkok</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand">Thailand</a>
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+            <p><span class="drop">I</span> went for a walk one evening along the concrete pathways that line the Chao Phraya river trying to work out a the solution to a broken bit of code that had gotten tangled up in my mind and in the project I was working on. I find that walking tends to work these sorts of things out; either that or they simply float away like butterflies in search of a different orchid. </p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Sunset Chao Phraya River Bangkok, Thailand" height="172" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/chaophrayasunset.jpg" width="250"></amp-img>I was walking toward the park where the last Tai Chi class was finishing up and the lights had just come on at the Phra Sumen Fort; it was just after sundown, the sky still glowed with the hazy goodbye that lingers for about half an hour as a red glow in the west. The park and the fort are familiar to me now in an odd way as I have walked by them nearly every evening for the past two weeks. It's strange how fast you can leave your familiar only to recreate it again wherever you go.</p>
+<p><break>
+For some reason a story <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int.html" title="Murakami interview in Salon">Haruki Murakami</a> recounts in his novel <em>South of the Border, West of the Sun</em> about something called Siberia Hysteria, popped into my head. I have no real way of knowing if this is true or not, but it is a good story and like most things probably gets closer to the truth if it isn't true. Murikami's narrative of Siberia Hysteria tells us to imagine that we are farmers in Siberia. Difficult at first, it works better if maybe you picture Barstow or Amarillo, someplace desolate, and everyday before dawn you get up and work the fields until sundown. Your life as a Siberian farmer is essentially, as Hobbes said, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." [In context this remark of Hobbes' comes from refuting the then popular notion, which still carries some currency today (especially among western travelers in the east), that "natural man," which is Rousseau's enlightened pre-civilized conception of utopia, somehow lived a life of great spiritual enlightenment etc.] But this life of farming in the tundra is your life and you have no other and so you live it day in and day out, excepting of course the wintertime. But then one day you wake up and find that you can no longer do what you have always done. Instead of heading to the fields to work that day like you did the day before, you throw down the plough and begin to walk west to the mythical land beyond the sun. You walk day and night, never stopping to eat or rest. </break></p>
+<p>The idea that one day something in you snaps and you are simply unable to do what it was you did the day before seems a common thread in the lives of my fellow travelers. Sometimes it is not you that snaps but the world around you, however, usually if the world around you has snapped chances are you were close to snapping too. And by snapping I don't mean anything necessarily bad. Though the word "snap" perhaps carries a negative connotation in this context, I do not mean it that way, this is not the sort of snap that postal workers were historically prone to (no offense to Andy's dad or my mother's cousin Dick), but a snap that is simply a hairpin turn of capacity. </p>
+<p>The Siberian Farmer story was in my mind as I walked along the river though in truth I was wondering about Jim Thompson more than the possibly mythic Siberian farmer. For those that have never heard of him, Jim Thompson was an American born expat, who came to Thailand toward the end of WWII. He was sent as a military attache to help organize a Thai resistance and drive out the Japanese. But by the time Thompson got to Thailand the Japanese had already surrendered. He returned to Thailand shortly thereafter under the auspices of Allen Dulles' OSS, the precursor to the CIA. </p>
+<p>I haven't been able to dig up much information on what it was that Thompson did for the OSS, but clearly he liked Thailand.  Thompson stayed around for a while before returning to New York where he had been an architect. But something in him must have snapped because he returned to Thailand two years later with an interest in the then cottage industry of silk weaving. He proceeded to single handedly created the modern silk industry in Thailand and in the process became fantastically wealthy. He built, or rather collected, a beautiful traditional Thai home, gathering buildings from around the country and bringing them together in Bangkok. Today his house is a museum open to the public and I had recently visited the area, which was why Jim Thompson was on my mind.</p>
+<p>But it wasn't the house I was thinking of exactly, I was wondering what happened to Jim Thompson. In 1967 Thompson went on vacation with some friends in the Cameroon highlands in Malaysia. On the afternoon of March 27th his friends lay down to take a nap and Thompson said he was going for a walk. He was never seen again. What's more there has never been a single shred of evidence of him ever found. It certainly wasn't for lack of trying. Malaysia sent four hundred soldiers into the jungle to look for him. They found nothing. No evidence of foul play, whether it have been human or tiger playing the foul, and no evidence of, well, just no evidence at all. </p>
+<p>It seems unlikely at this point that we will ever get to know what became of Thompson. It's possible he was kidnapped. It's possible a very thorough and hungry tiger ate him. It's possible he willfully disappeared. His brief employment with the fledging CIA naturally leads to speculation about these things since any sort of legitimate trading operation would be just the thing the CIA loves to use as a cover, but the truth is no one knows and know one ever will, it's as if Thompson simply slipped through a worm hole into that land beyond the sun.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Orchids Jim Thompson's House Bangkok, Thailand" height="260" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/thompsonorchids.jpg" width="203"></amp-img>The house he left behind is gorgeous, but the real charm is the garden and its orchids. I wandered around the gardens which really aren't that large for some time and then found a bench near a collection of orchids, where I sat for the better part of an hour, occasionally taking a photograph or two, but mostly thinking about how human orchids are. Of course in the west were most familiar with the ones on corsages, but Orchidaceae is one of the largest families in the plant kingdom and ranges in flower from tiny little ones the size of a mosquito to others the size of dinner plate. But the thing that struck me about them, which I had never noticed before is that the flowers of orchids are almost perfectly bilateral, just like the human body. Perhaps we are drawn to orchids because they reflect our symmetry and the symmetry we try to find in our lives. </p>
+<p>Symmetry implies a kind of duality, but dualities are out of vogue I suppose, Einsteinian notions being more cutting edge these days, and yet dualities still seem to pop up where ever you look. After staring for a while at the various red and yellow and purple orchids dropping gently at the end of their stalks, I started to think that maybe an Einsteinian world and a world of dualities are not so much at odds as we might think. Take the orchid for instance; on one hand its flower is bilateral, symmetrical, dual sides built around the tongue where insects land, and yet within this seeming constraint, the diversity of the flower size and color is relative to the species producing it.</p>
+<p>Eventually I pulled myself away from the orchids and went to see the collections of Thai silk and artwork that the tour mentioned, but skipped over. Thompson, while not a Buddhist, was a great collector of Buddhist art. Thailand is saturated with images of the Buddha, saturated and venerated to the point that sometimes it seems like perhaps the message of Buddha has been overlooked in favor of his iconography. <amp-img alt="7th Century Buddha, Bangkok, Thailand" height="239" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/headlessbuddha.jpg" width="133"></amp-img>Like most religious inspirers I believe it's likely that Buddha would quietly shake his head at the things people do in his name, but some of the pieces at Thompson's house were old enough and humble enough that they seemed like something the Buddha himself might have collected, were he a collector of art, which he most certainly was not. The one piece that particularly fascinated me was a headless, armless Buddha which the tour guide claimed was from the 7th century. After making my way through the various displays of very old silk, I returned to the headless statue of Buddha.</p>
+<p>I know I shouldn't have and I never have in a museum, but something about the stone, the ragged edge where the head had once been contrasted with the smooth, worn surface the builder intended, I couldn't help myself. After making sure no one was around, I ran my hands down the side of the statue along the broken edge and then across the polished carved portion. It was cool to the touch and though it may have been my overactive imagination, the stone felt somehow alive. It was then that I realized I don't want to see any more images of the Buddha, that stone was as close to Buddha as we will ever get.</p>
+<p>What made this Buddha different was its humility; it was broken, cracked, worn and somehow human. Perhaps that's our ultimate fantasy of art, that our Pygmalion wishes be granted, that art might literally become alive to us. But it already is alive, the stone is living, living so slowly and quietly that it's imperceptible, but living nonetheless. I've always found the duality in the question, ‘does life reflect art or art reflect life' to be the most irritating of dualities. Clearly both happen. True the statue that stood before me was not as it had been designed, its head had come off by accident not purpose, but isn't that why we make art, too see it interact with history? Without history, art becomes airless and stale, it's for sale at the side of the street—a ten dollar trinket. Isn't that the two way street, art does not reflect life it molds itself in life's reflection and life does not reflect art, but recasts art with the passage of time. This headless Buddha is both a reflection of life, of Buddha and yet life has added its own truth, taken away the head, as if to say, be honest, you have no idea what the Buddha looked like, better that you should not even try.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Phra Sumen Fort, Bangkok, Thailand" height="270" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/phrasumenfort.jpg" width="203"></amp-img>I sat down on a bench beside the fort to rest for a little while with thoughts of orchids, Jim Thompson, headless Buddha and Siberian Hysteria whirling round my head in an endless dialogue with one another when a headline from the morning's paper jumped out at me, it had said that a team of researchers using some advanced facial recognition algorithm to calculate that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy. I don't know much about algorithms except that there seems to be newer and shinier ones everyday. Arthur C. Clarke once said, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Algorithms are, to lay-people like me, sufficiently advanced as to appear magical. So I reworded the news in my head: a team of researchers used magic to determine that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy. What a poor use of magic. Better to have lopped the head of Michelangelo's' David so that in fourteen centuries we will remember what we don't know.</p>
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+            <p><span class="drop">I</span> went for a walk one evening along the concrete pathways that line the Chao Phraya river trying to work out a the solution to a broken bit of code that had gotten tangled up in my mind and in the project I was working on. I find that walking tends to work these sorts of things out; either that or they simply float away like butterflies in search of a different orchid. </p>
+<p><img alt="Sunset Chao Phraya River Bangkok, Thailand" class="postpicright" height="172" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/chaophrayasunset.jpg" width="250"/>I was walking toward the park where the last Tai Chi class was finishing up and the lights had just come on at the Phra Sumen Fort; it was just after sundown, the sky still glowed with the hazy goodbye that lingers for about half an hour as a red glow in the west. The park and the fort are familiar to me now in an odd way as I have walked by them nearly every evening for the past two weeks. It&#8217;s strange how fast you can leave your familiar only to recreate it again wherever you go.</p>
+<p><break>
+For some reason a story <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int.html" title="Murakami interview in Salon">Haruki Murakami</a> recounts in his novel <em>South of the Border, West of the Sun</em> about something called Siberia Hysteria, popped into my head. I have no real way of knowing if this is true or not, but it is a good story and like most things probably gets closer to the truth if it isn&#8217;t true. Murikami&#8217;s narrative of Siberia Hysteria tells us to imagine that we are farmers in Siberia. Difficult at first, it works better if maybe you picture Barstow or Amarillo, someplace desolate, and everyday before dawn you get up and work the fields until sundown. Your life as a Siberian farmer is essentially, as Hobbes said, &#8220;solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.&#8221; [In context this remark of Hobbes&#8217; comes from refuting the then popular notion, which still carries some currency today (especially among western travelers in the east), that &#8220;natural man,&#8221; which is Rousseau&#8217;s enlightened pre-civilized conception of utopia, somehow lived a life of great spiritual enlightenment etc.] But this life of farming in the tundra is your life and you have no other and so you live it day in and day out, excepting of course the wintertime. But then one day you wake up and find that you can no longer do what you have always done. Instead of heading to the fields to work that day like you did the day before, you throw down the plough and begin to walk west to the mythical land beyond the sun. You walk day and night, never stopping to eat or rest. </p>
+<p>The idea that one day something in you snaps and you are simply unable to do what it was you did the day before seems a common thread in the lives of my fellow travelers. Sometimes it is not you that snaps but the world around you, however, usually if the world around you has snapped chances are you were close to snapping too. And by snapping I don&#8217;t mean anything necessarily bad. Though the word &#8220;snap&#8221; perhaps carries a negative connotation in this context, I do not mean it that way, this is not the sort of snap that postal workers were historically prone to (no offense to Andy&#8217;s dad or my mother&#8217;s cousin Dick), but a snap that is simply a hairpin turn of capacity. </p>
+<p>The Siberian Farmer story was in my mind as I walked along the river though in truth I was wondering about Jim Thompson more than the possibly mythic Siberian farmer. For those that have never heard of him, Jim Thompson was an American born expat, who came to Thailand toward the end of WWII. He was sent as a military attache to help organize a Thai resistance and drive out the Japanese. But by the time Thompson got to Thailand the Japanese had already surrendered. He returned to Thailand shortly thereafter under the auspices of Allen Dulles&#8217; OSS, the precursor to the CIA. </p>
+<p>I haven&#8217;t been able to dig up much information on what it was that Thompson did for the OSS, but clearly he liked Thailand.  Thompson stayed around for a while before returning to New York where he had been an architect. But something in him must have snapped because he returned to Thailand two years later with an interest in the then cottage industry of silk weaving. He proceeded to single handedly created the modern silk industry in Thailand and in the process became fantastically wealthy. He built, or rather collected, a beautiful traditional Thai home, gathering buildings from around the country and bringing them together in Bangkok. Today his house is a museum open to the public and I had recently visited the area, which was why Jim Thompson was on my mind.</p>
+<p>But it wasn&#8217;t the house I was thinking of exactly, I was wondering what happened to Jim Thompson. In 1967 Thompson went on vacation with some friends in the Cameroon highlands in Malaysia. On the afternoon of March 27th his friends lay down to take a nap and Thompson said he was going for a walk. He was never seen again. What&#8217;s more there has never been a single shred of evidence of him ever found. It certainly wasn&#8217;t for lack of trying. Malaysia sent four hundred soldiers into the jungle to look for him. They found nothing. No evidence of foul play, whether it have been human or tiger playing the foul, and no evidence of, well, just no evidence at all. </p>
+<p>It seems unlikely at this point that we will ever get to know what became of Thompson. It&#8217;s possible he was kidnapped. It&#8217;s possible a very thorough and hungry tiger ate him. It&#8217;s possible he willfully disappeared. His brief employment with the fledging CIA naturally leads to speculation about these things since any sort of legitimate trading operation would be just the thing the CIA loves to use as a cover, but the truth is no one knows and know one ever will, it&#8217;s as if Thompson simply slipped through a worm hole into that land beyond the sun.</p>
+<p><img alt="Orchids Jim Thompson's House Bangkok, Thailand" class="postpic" height="260" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/thompsonorchids.jpg" width="203"/>The house he left behind is gorgeous, but the real charm is the garden and its orchids. I wandered around the gardens which really aren&#8217;t that large for some time and then found a bench near a collection of orchids, where I sat for the better part of an hour, occasionally taking a photograph or two, but mostly thinking about how human orchids are. Of course in the west were most familiar with the ones on corsages, but Orchidaceae is one of the largest families in the plant kingdom and ranges in flower from tiny little ones the size of a mosquito to others the size of dinner plate. But the thing that struck me about them, which I had never noticed before is that the flowers of orchids are almost perfectly bilateral, just like the human body. Perhaps we are drawn to orchids because they reflect our symmetry and the symmetry we try to find in our lives. </p>
+<p>Symmetry implies a kind of duality, but dualities are out of vogue I suppose, Einsteinian notions being more cutting edge these days, and yet dualities still seem to pop up where ever you look. After staring for a while at the various red and yellow and purple orchids dropping gently at the end of their stalks, I started to think that maybe an Einsteinian world and a world of dualities are not so much at odds as we might think. Take the orchid for instance; on one hand its flower is bilateral, symmetrical, dual sides built around the tongue where insects land, and yet within this seeming constraint, the diversity of the flower size and color is relative to the species producing it.</p>
+<p>Eventually I pulled myself away from the orchids and went to see the collections of Thai silk and artwork that the tour mentioned, but skipped over. Thompson, while not a Buddhist, was a great collector of Buddhist art. Thailand is saturated with images of the Buddha, saturated and venerated to the point that sometimes it seems like perhaps the message of Buddha has been overlooked in favor of his iconography. <img alt="7th Century Buddha, Bangkok, Thailand" class="postpicright" height="239" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/headlessbuddha.jpg" width="133"/>Like most religious inspirers I believe it&#8217;s likely that Buddha would quietly shake his head at the things people do in his name, but some of the pieces at Thompson&#8217;s house were old enough and humble enough that they seemed like something the Buddha himself might have collected, were he a collector of art, which he most certainly was not. The one piece that particularly fascinated me was a headless, armless Buddha which the tour guide claimed was from the 7th century. After making my way through the various displays of very old silk, I returned to the headless statue of Buddha.</p>
+<p>I know I shouldn&#8217;t have and I never have in a museum, but something about the stone, the ragged edge where the head had once been contrasted with the smooth, worn surface the builder intended, I couldn&#8217;t help myself. After making sure no one was around, I ran my hands down the side of the statue along the broken edge and then across the polished carved portion. It was cool to the touch and though it may have been my overactive imagination, the stone felt somehow alive. It was then that I realized I don&#8217;t want to see any more images of the Buddha, that stone was as close to Buddha as we will ever get.</p>
+<p>What made this Buddha different was its humility; it was broken, cracked, worn and somehow human. Perhaps that&#8217;s our ultimate fantasy of art, that our Pygmalion wishes be granted, that art might literally become alive to us. But it already is alive, the stone is living, living so slowly and quietly that it&#8217;s imperceptible, but living nonetheless. I&#8217;ve always found the duality in the question, &#8216;does life reflect art or art reflect life&#8217; to be the most irritating of dualities. Clearly both happen. True the statue that stood before me was not as it had been designed, its head had come off by accident not purpose, but isn&#8217;t that why we make art, too see it interact with history? Without history, art becomes airless and stale, it&#8217;s for sale at the side of the street&mdash;a ten dollar trinket. Isn&#8217;t that the two way street, art does not reflect life it molds itself in life&#8217;s reflection and life does not reflect art, but recasts art with the passage of time. This headless Buddha is both a reflection of life, of Buddha and yet life has added its own truth, taken away the head, as if to say, be honest, you have no idea what the Buddha looked like, better that you should not even try.</p>
+<p><img alt="Phra Sumen Fort, Bangkok, Thailand" class="postpic" height="270" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/phrasumenfort.jpg" width="203"/>I sat down on a bench beside the fort to rest for a little while with thoughts of orchids, Jim Thompson, headless Buddha and Siberian Hysteria whirling round my head in an endless dialogue with one another when a headline from the morning&#8217;s paper jumped out at me, it had said that a team of researchers using some advanced facial recognition algorithm to calculate that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy. I don&#8217;t know much about algorithms except that there seems to be newer and shinier ones everyday. Arthur C. Clarke once said, &#8220;any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.&#8221; Algorithms are, to lay-people like me, sufficiently advanced as to appear magical. So I reworded the news in my head: a team of researchers used magic to determine that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy. What a poor use of magic. Better to have lopped the head of Michelangelo&#8217;s&#8216; David so that in fourteen centuries we will remember what we don&#8217;t know.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..327929b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/buddha-bounty.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+Buddha on the Bounty
+====================
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/buddha-bounty>
+    Thursday, 05 January 2006
+
+<span class="drop">I</span> went for a walk one evening along the concrete pathways that line the Chao Phraya river trying to work out a the solution to a broken bit of code that had gotten tangled up in my mind and in the project I was working on. I find that walking tends to work these sorts of things out; either that or they simply float away like butterflies in search of a different orchid. 
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/chaophrayasunset.jpg" width="250" height="172" class="postpicright" alt="Sunset Chao Phraya River Bangkok, Thailand" />I was walking toward the park where the last Tai Chi class was finishing up and the lights had just come on at the Phra Sumen Fort; it was just after sundown, the sky still glowed with the hazy goodbye that lingers for about half an hour as a red glow in the west. The park and the fort are familiar to me now in an odd way as I have walked by them nearly every evening for the past two weeks. It's strange how fast you can leave your familiar only to recreate it again wherever you go.
+
+<break>
+For some reason a story <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int.html" title="Murakami interview in Salon">Haruki Murakami</a> recounts in his novel *South of the Border, West of the Sun* about something called Siberia Hysteria, popped into my head. I have no real way of knowing if this is true or not, but it is a good story and like most things probably gets closer to the truth if it isn't true. Murikami's narrative of Siberia Hysteria tells us to imagine that we are farmers in Siberia. Difficult at first, it works better if maybe you picture Barstow or Amarillo, someplace desolate, and everyday before dawn you get up and work the fields until sundown. Your life as a Siberian farmer is essentially, as Hobbes said, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." [In context this remark of Hobbes' comes from refuting the then popular notion, which still carries some currency today (especially among western travelers in the east), that "natural man," which is Rousseau's enlightened pre-civilized conception of utopia, somehow lived a life of great spiritual enlightenment etc.] But this life of farming in the tundra is your life and you have no other and so you live it day in and day out, excepting of course the wintertime. But then one day you wake up and find that you can no longer do what you have always done. Instead of heading to the fields to work that day like you did the day before, you throw down the plough and begin to walk west to the mythical land beyond the sun. You walk day and night, never stopping to eat or rest. 
+
+The idea that one day something in you snaps and you are simply unable to do what it was you did the day before seems a common thread in the lives of my fellow travelers. Sometimes it is not you that snaps but the world around you, however, usually if the world around you has snapped chances are you were close to snapping too. And by snapping I don't mean anything necessarily bad. Though the word "snap" perhaps carries a negative connotation in this context, I do not mean it that way, this is not the sort of snap that postal workers were historically prone to (no offense to Andy's dad or my mother's cousin Dick), but a snap that is simply a hairpin turn of capacity. 
+
+The Siberian Farmer story was in my mind as I walked along the river though in truth I was wondering about Jim Thompson more than the possibly mythic Siberian farmer. For those that have never heard of him, Jim Thompson was an American born expat, who came to Thailand toward the end of WWII. He was sent as a military attache to help organize a Thai resistance and drive out the Japanese. But by the time Thompson got to Thailand the Japanese had already surrendered. He returned to Thailand shortly thereafter under the auspices of Allen Dulles' OSS, the precursor to the CIA. 
+
+I haven't been able to dig up much information on what it was that Thompson did for the OSS, but clearly he liked Thailand.  Thompson stayed around for a while before returning to New York where he had been an architect. But something in him must have snapped because he returned to Thailand two years later with an interest in the then cottage industry of silk weaving. He proceeded to single handedly created the modern silk industry in Thailand and in the process became fantastically wealthy. He built, or rather collected, a beautiful traditional Thai home, gathering buildings from around the country and bringing them together in Bangkok. Today his house is a museum open to the public and I had recently visited the area, which was why Jim Thompson was on my mind.
+
+But it wasn't the house I was thinking of exactly, I was wondering what happened to Jim Thompson. In 1967 Thompson went on vacation with some friends in the Cameroon highlands in Malaysia. On the afternoon of March 27th his friends lay down to take a nap and Thompson said he was going for a walk. He was never seen again. What's more there has never been a single shred of evidence of him ever found. It certainly wasn't for lack of trying. Malaysia sent four hundred soldiers into the jungle to look for him. They found nothing. No evidence of foul play, whether it have been human or tiger playing the foul, and no evidence of, well, just no evidence at all. 
+
+It seems unlikely at this point that we will ever get to know what became of Thompson. It's possible he was kidnapped. It's possible a very thorough and hungry tiger ate him. It's possible he willfully disappeared. His brief employment with the fledging CIA naturally leads to speculation about these things since any sort of legitimate trading operation would be just the thing the CIA loves to use as a cover, but the truth is no one knows and know one ever will, it's as if Thompson simply slipped through a worm hole into that land beyond the sun.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/thompsonorchids.jpg" width="203" height="260" class="postpic" alt="Orchids Jim Thompson's House Bangkok, Thailand" />The house he left behind is gorgeous, but the real charm is the garden and its orchids. I wandered around the gardens which really aren't that large for some time and then found a bench near a collection of orchids, where I sat for the better part of an hour, occasionally taking a photograph or two, but mostly thinking about how human orchids are. Of course in the west were most familiar with the ones on corsages, but Orchidaceae is one of the largest families in the plant kingdom and ranges in flower from tiny little ones the size of a mosquito to others the size of dinner plate. But the thing that struck me about them, which I had never noticed before is that the flowers of orchids are almost perfectly bilateral, just like the human body. Perhaps we are drawn to orchids because they reflect our symmetry and the symmetry we try to find in our lives. 
+
+Symmetry implies a kind of duality, but dualities are out of vogue I suppose, Einsteinian notions being more cutting edge these days, and yet dualities still seem to pop up where ever you look. After staring for a while at the various red and yellow and purple orchids dropping gently at the end of their stalks, I started to think that maybe an Einsteinian world and a world of dualities are not so much at odds as we might think. Take the orchid for instance; on one hand its flower is bilateral, symmetrical, dual sides built around the tongue where insects land, and yet within this seeming constraint, the diversity of the flower size and color is relative to the species producing it.
+
+Eventually I pulled myself away from the orchids and went to see the collections of Thai silk and artwork that the tour mentioned, but skipped over. Thompson, while not a Buddhist, was a great collector of Buddhist art. Thailand is saturated with images of the Buddha, saturated and venerated to the point that sometimes it seems like perhaps the message of Buddha has been overlooked in favor of his iconography. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/headlessbuddha.jpg" width="133" height="239" class="postpicright" alt="7th Century Buddha, Bangkok, Thailand" />Like most religious inspirers I believe it's likely that Buddha would quietly shake his head at the things people do in his name, but some of the pieces at Thompson's house were old enough and humble enough that they seemed like something the Buddha himself might have collected, were he a collector of art, which he most certainly was not. The one piece that particularly fascinated me was a headless, armless Buddha which the tour guide claimed was from the 7th century. After making my way through the various displays of very old silk, I returned to the headless statue of Buddha.
+
+I know I shouldn't have and I never have in a museum, but something about the stone, the ragged edge where the head had once been contrasted with the smooth, worn surface the builder intended, I couldn't help myself. After making sure no one was around, I ran my hands down the side of the statue along the broken edge and then across the polished carved portion. It was cool to the touch and though it may have been my overactive imagination, the stone felt somehow alive. It was then that I realized I don't want to see any more images of the Buddha, that stone was as close to Buddha as we will ever get.
+
+What made this Buddha different was its humility; it was broken, cracked, worn and somehow human. Perhaps that's our ultimate fantasy of art, that our Pygmalion wishes be granted, that art might literally become alive to us. But it already is alive, the stone is living, living so slowly and quietly that it's imperceptible, but living nonetheless. I've always found the duality in the question, &#8216;does life reflect art or art reflect life' to be the most irritating of dualities. Clearly both happen. True the statue that stood before me was not as it had been designed, its head had come off by accident not purpose, but isn't that why we make art, too see it interact with history? Without history, art becomes airless and stale, it's for sale at the side of the street&mdash;a ten dollar trinket. Isn't that the two way street, art does not reflect life it molds itself in life's reflection and life does not reflect art, but recasts art with the passage of time. This headless Buddha is both a reflection of life, of Buddha and yet life has added its own truth, taken away the head, as if to say, be honest, you have no idea what the Buddha looked like, better that you should not even try.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/phrasumenfort.jpg" width="203" height="270" class="postpic" alt="Phra Sumen Fort, Bangkok, Thailand" />I sat down on a bench beside the fort to rest for a little while with thoughts of orchids, Jim Thompson, headless Buddha and Siberian Hysteria whirling round my head in an endless dialogue with one another when a headline from the morning's paper jumped out at me, it had said that a team of researchers using some advanced facial recognition algorithm to calculate that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy. I don't know much about algorithms except that there seems to be newer and shinier ones everyday. Arthur C. Clarke once said, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Algorithms are, to lay-people like me, sufficiently advanced as to appear magical. So I reworded the news in my head: a team of researchers used magic to determine that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy. What a poor use of magic. Better to have lopped the head of Michelangelo's' David so that in fourteen centuries we will remember what we don't know.
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+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Down the&nbsp;River</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-17T20:13:26" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>17, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
+                <aside class="p-location h-adr adr post--location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <span class="p-region">Luang Prabang</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/laos/" title="travel writing from Lao (PDR)">Lao (PDR)</a>
+                </aside>
+            </header>
+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p><span class="drop">M</span>orning in Chiang Khong Thailand revealed itself as a foggy, and not a little mysterious, affair with the far shore of the Mekong, the Laos shore, almost completely hidden in a veil of mist. The first ferry crossed at eight and not wanting to get caught in the mess of tourists crossing that day, I made sure to be on the first ferry.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Morning Mist Mekong River Laos" height="139" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/mekongfog.jpg" width="239"></amp-img>After crossing through the respective borders and getting my passport stamped, I made my way up the road to the docks where I was to catch a slow boat to Luang Prabang. My head was full of statistics as I walked through the bustling border town of Huey Xui, Laos. I half expected to see a sign that said welcome to the Mekong Valley where the U.S. led troops of Laos and Thailand never fought a secret war, where there were not one and a half more bombing sorties flown than in all of Vietnam, where the total metric tonnage of bombs dropped was not 450,000 which of course, was not a whooping half ton per man, woman and child in Laos, because if it is not written down, it did not happen. But there was no commemoration of the terrible legacy that still haunts Laos.</p>
+<p>You would never even realize a war had been fought here from aboard the slow boat where I and roughly sixty other passengers sat in cramped quarters watching the green jungle covered hills slide past. Indeed it was hard to imagine that anyone would want to invest the staggering $2 million dollars a day every day for nine years that the U.S. invested into the war in Laos. And yet the fact remains, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare.</p>
+<p>The slow boat, which is not necessary slow, it just isn't a speedboat several of which passed us in the course of our two day journey and without exception the passengers looked, cold, windblown, probably near deaf and generally miserable; the slow boat was meant for perhaps forty passengers, could actually seat about thirty and yet as with any transportation in the east, was packed to the gills. But the tight quarters often turn out to be fun in perverse ways; there is a certain bond that forms among those that suffer together. One of the best things about traveling is the people you meet, whether they are fellow travelers or indigenous locals. I had met up with a Swedish man named Robin and an Israeli lad, Ofir on the bus ride from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong and since we were all headed into Laos and down the Mekong to Luang Prabang, we just sort of fell in together. On the boat I found myself seated next to an Irish girl, Siobhan, who later tagged along with our multi-national travel party for a few days. </p>
+<p>Edward Abbey, the source of today's title, once wrote, "everyone must at some point go down the river." No stranger to rivers, Abbey went down a few, both the metaphorical and literal sort and my journey down the Mekong was similarly filled with both the metaphorical and literal journeys. It took two eight hour days in cramped conditions to get from Huey Xui where we crossed into Laos, to Luang Prabang, which was to be my first stop. I was glad for the company of Robin, Ofir and Siobhan, but still there were long periods of near silence in which everyone's face seemed to me lost in some private mental journey, as if it were not possible to simply go down a river, but that the action necessary required an equal action on the part of the mind.</p>
+<p>I do not know what absorbed my fellow passengers between reading and talking, those relatively quite moments (save for the continuous roaring white noise of the smoking diesel engine) where we simply stared at the limestone cliffs or the sandbars along the shore, but for me the mental journey became a process of abandonment. To say that traveling changes you would be a gross misstatement, but it does bring into focus any number of things that may have previously only lingered on the peripherals of your mind. My journey has been a slow process of letting go; I would not say I am different than when I left, but nevertheless I suppose I somehow am. At the end of the day, when the sun sets over whatever river you happen to be headed down, there is inevitably some change from that foggy morning that saw you off. You must let go of things to travel down a river.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Mekong Sunset, Laos" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/mekongsunset.jpg" width="286"></amp-img>And while a voice in the back of my head said just before I stepped off the boat in Luang Prabang, you cannot let go completely of anything, you will always have this thin strand of cotton wrapped about your smallest finger if for no other reason than to let it fall aside is to abandon hope entirely, I did, somewhere in the muddy waters of the Mekong, cast off huge chunks of myself, chunks that had been falling away for some time, but now perhaps because of the river, perhaps only the free and empty time, those chunks seemed to slough off at last. Most of these things that fell off me were too nebulous or vague to understand, I could not for instance say what I was letting go of or whether or not I would miss it, rather that the process of letting go was what was difficult. The thing or idea or dream was inevitably a product of my imagination, it had never been real to begin with, so letting go of <strong>it</strong> was natural, even if the process perhaps was not. </p>
+<p>On the second day, after talking for a while with Siobhan about how dreams and traveling intermingle, I was in the ensuing silence suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps our dreams are ultimately acts of arrogance, or at least become so when we cling to them too tightly, cling to them until they do not guide us, but imprison us. Dreams must be cast off before reality is allowed to happen.</p>
+<p>Which is not to say my friends that a dream can not merge with reality, that they can not be one and same, but merely that they must be let go of in the mind before they will take shape in the world. It is perhaps the act of letting go that eliminates the certainties of cannot or will not, and replaces them with might, could and have; or, to put it in the vernacular of James Bond film titles, never say never.</p>
+<p>This feeling grew stronger and more disorienting when I fell ill with a bout of food poisoning. I lay on the floor of the guest house bathroom for the better part of two days vomiting horrible liquids out both ends of my digestive system, not a pleasant experience I can assure you, but somewhere in those tortured early morning hours, as I hugged the porcelain toilet that had become to sum total of my universe, it occurred to me how quickly our worlds can be reduced. Not just dreams we may try to let go of, but also our physical worlds and not only are we incapable of ever saying anything with certainty, we are incapable of even saying that. In other words, to say there is no certainty is itself a statement of certainty and therefore we find ourselves right where Joseph Heller so aptly described in <em>Catch-22</em>. </p>
+<p><break>
+Did I travel for two days down the Mekong River here to Luang Prabang? Is there a place where you still are, that I am not? Is there a place here that I am and you are not? Uncertainties I cannot wrap my still fevered brain around except to say that however the words might twist and turn like the Mekong, in the end they are the only things that make it real to me. </break></p>
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+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post-title" itemprop="headline">Down the River</h1>
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+                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(19.875064447947235, 102.13199614056808, { type:'point', lat:'19.875064447947235', lon:'102.13199614056808'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
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+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2006-01-17T20:13:26" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>17, 2006</span></time>
+                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
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+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p><span class="drop">M</span>orning in Chiang Khong Thailand revealed itself as a foggy, and not a little mysterious, affair with the far shore of the Mekong, the Laos shore, almost completely hidden in a veil of mist. The first ferry crossed at eight and not wanting to get caught in the mess of tourists crossing that day, I made sure to be on the first ferry.</p>
+<p><img alt="Morning Mist Mekong River Laos" class="postpic" height="139" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/mekongfog.jpg" width="239"/>After crossing through the respective borders and getting my passport stamped, I made my way up the road to the docks where I was to catch a slow boat to Luang Prabang. My head was full of statistics as I walked through the bustling border town of Huey Xui, Laos. I half expected to see a sign that said welcome to the Mekong Valley where the U.S. led troops of Laos and Thailand never fought a secret war, where there were not one and a half more bombing sorties flown than in all of Vietnam, where the total metric tonnage of bombs dropped was not 450,000 which of course, was not a whooping half ton per man, woman and child in Laos, because if it is not written down, it did not happen. But there was no commemoration of the terrible legacy that still haunts Laos.</p>
+<p>You would never even realize a war had been fought here from aboard the slow boat where I and roughly sixty other passengers sat in cramped quarters watching the green jungle covered hills slide past. Indeed it was hard to imagine that anyone would want to invest the staggering $2 million dollars a day every day for nine years that the U.S. invested into the war in Laos. And yet the fact remains, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare.</p>
+<p>The slow boat, which is not necessary slow, it just isn&#8217;t a speedboat several of which passed us in the course of our two day journey and without exception the passengers looked, cold, windblown, probably near deaf and generally miserable; the slow boat was meant for perhaps forty passengers, could actually seat about thirty and yet as with any transportation in the east, was packed to the gills. But the tight quarters often turn out to be fun in perverse ways; there is a certain bond that forms among those that suffer together. One of the best things about traveling is the people you meet, whether they are fellow travelers or indigenous locals. I had met up with a Swedish man named Robin and an Israeli lad, Ofir on the bus ride from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong and since we were all headed into Laos and down the Mekong to Luang Prabang, we just sort of fell in together. On the boat I found myself seated next to an Irish girl, Siobhan, who later tagged along with our multi-national travel party for a few days. </p>
+<p>Edward Abbey, the source of today&#8217;s title, once wrote, &#8220;everyone must at some point go down the river.&#8221; No stranger to rivers, Abbey went down a few, both the metaphorical and literal sort and my journey down the Mekong was similarly filled with both the metaphorical and literal journeys. It took two eight hour days in cramped conditions to get from Huey Xui where we crossed into Laos, to Luang Prabang, which was to be my first stop. I was glad for the company of Robin, Ofir and Siobhan, but still there were long periods of near silence in which everyone&#8217;s face seemed to me lost in some private mental journey, as if it were not possible to simply go down a river, but that the action necessary required an equal action on the part of the mind.</p>
+<p>I do not know what absorbed my fellow passengers between reading and talking, those relatively quite moments (save for the continuous roaring white noise of the smoking diesel engine) where we simply stared at the limestone cliffs or the sandbars along the shore, but for me the mental journey became a process of abandonment. To say that traveling changes you would be a gross misstatement, but it does bring into focus any number of things that may have previously only lingered on the peripherals of your mind. My journey has been a slow process of letting go; I would not say I am different than when I left, but nevertheless I suppose I somehow am. At the end of the day, when the sun sets over whatever river you happen to be headed down, there is inevitably some change from that foggy morning that saw you off. You must let go of things to travel down a river.</p>
+<p><img alt="Mekong Sunset, Laos" class="postpicright" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/mekongsunset.jpg" width="286"/>And while a voice in the back of my head said just before I stepped off the boat in Luang Prabang, you cannot let go completely of anything, you will always have this thin strand of cotton wrapped about your smallest finger if for no other reason than to let it fall aside is to abandon hope entirely, I did, somewhere in the muddy waters of the Mekong, cast off huge chunks of myself, chunks that had been falling away for some time, but now perhaps because of the river, perhaps only the free and empty time, those chunks seemed to slough off at last. Most of these things that fell off me were too nebulous or vague to understand, I could not for instance say what I was letting go of or whether or not I would miss it, rather that the process of letting go was what was difficult. The thing or idea or dream was inevitably a product of my imagination, it had never been real to begin with, so letting go of <strong>it</strong> was natural, even if the process perhaps was not. </p>
+<p>On the second day, after talking for a while with Siobhan about how dreams and traveling intermingle, I was in the ensuing silence suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps our dreams are ultimately acts of arrogance, or at least become so when we cling to them too tightly, cling to them until they do not guide us, but imprison us. Dreams must be cast off before reality is allowed to happen.</p>
+<p>Which is not to say my friends that a dream can not merge with reality, that they can not be one and same, but merely that they must be let go of in the mind before they will take shape in the world. It is perhaps the act of letting go that eliminates the certainties of cannot or will not, and replaces them with might, could and have; or, to put it in the vernacular of James Bond film titles, never say never.</p>
+<p>This feeling grew stronger and more disorienting when I fell ill with a bout of food poisoning. I lay on the floor of the guest house bathroom for the better part of two days vomiting horrible liquids out both ends of my digestive system, not a pleasant experience I can assure you, but somewhere in those tortured early morning hours, as I hugged the porcelain toilet that had become to sum total of my universe, it occurred to me how quickly our worlds can be reduced. Not just dreams we may try to let go of, but also our physical worlds and not only are we incapable of ever saying anything with certainty, we are incapable of even saying that. In other words, to say there is no certainty is itself a statement of certainty and therefore we find ourselves right where Joseph Heller so aptly described in <em>Catch-22</em>. </p>
+<p><break>
+Did I travel for two days down the Mekong River here to Luang Prabang? Is there a place where you still are, that I am not? Is there a place here that I am and you are not? Uncertainties I cannot wrap my still fevered brain around except to say that however the words might twist and turn like the Mekong, in the end they are the only things that make it real to me. </p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/down-river.txt
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+Down the River
+==============
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/down-river>
+    Tuesday, 17 January 2006
+
+<span class="drop">M</span>orning in Chiang Khong Thailand revealed itself as a foggy, and not a little mysterious, affair with the far shore of the Mekong, the Laos shore, almost completely hidden in a veil of mist. The first ferry crossed at eight and not wanting to get caught in the mess of tourists crossing that day, I made sure to be on the first ferry.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/mekongfog.jpg" width="239" height="139" class="postpic" alt="Morning Mist Mekong River Laos" />After crossing through the respective borders and getting my passport stamped, I made my way up the road to the docks where I was to catch a slow boat to Luang Prabang. My head was full of statistics as I walked through the bustling border town of Huey Xui, Laos. I half expected to see a sign that said welcome to the Mekong Valley where the U.S. led troops of Laos and Thailand never fought a secret war, where there were not one and a half more bombing sorties flown than in all of Vietnam, where the total metric tonnage of bombs dropped was not 450,000 which of course, was not a whooping half ton per man, woman and child in Laos, because if it is not written down, it did not happen. But there was no commemoration of the terrible legacy that still haunts Laos.
+
+You would never even realize a war had been fought here from aboard the slow boat where I and roughly sixty other passengers sat in cramped quarters watching the green jungle covered hills slide past. Indeed it was hard to imagine that anyone would want to invest the staggering $2 million dollars a day every day for nine years that the U.S. invested into the war in Laos. And yet the fact remains, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare.
+
+The slow boat, which is not necessary slow, it just isn't a speedboat several of which passed us in the course of our two day journey and without exception the passengers looked, cold, windblown, probably near deaf and generally miserable; the slow boat was meant for perhaps forty passengers, could actually seat about thirty and yet as with any transportation in the east, was packed to the gills. But the tight quarters often turn out to be fun in perverse ways; there is a certain bond that forms among those that suffer together. One of the best things about traveling is the people you meet, whether they are fellow travelers or indigenous locals. I had met up with a Swedish man named Robin and an Israeli lad, Ofir on the bus ride from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong and since we were all headed into Laos and down the Mekong to Luang Prabang, we just sort of fell in together. On the boat I found myself seated next to an Irish girl, Siobhan, who later tagged along with our multi-national travel party for a few days. 
+
+Edward Abbey, the source of today's title, once wrote, "everyone must at some point go down the river." No stranger to rivers, Abbey went down a few, both the metaphorical and literal sort and my journey down the Mekong was similarly filled with both the metaphorical and literal journeys. It took two eight hour days in cramped conditions to get from Huey Xui where we crossed into Laos, to Luang Prabang, which was to be my first stop. I was glad for the company of Robin, Ofir and Siobhan, but still there were long periods of near silence in which everyone's face seemed to me lost in some private mental journey, as if it were not possible to simply go down a river, but that the action necessary required an equal action on the part of the mind.
+
+I do not know what absorbed my fellow passengers between reading and talking, those relatively quite moments (save for the continuous roaring white noise of the smoking diesel engine) where we simply stared at the limestone cliffs or the sandbars along the shore, but for me the mental journey became a process of abandonment. To say that traveling changes you would be a gross misstatement, but it does bring into focus any number of things that may have previously only lingered on the peripherals of your mind. My journey has been a slow process of letting go; I would not say I am different than when I left, but nevertheless I suppose I somehow am. At the end of the day, when the sun sets over whatever river you happen to be headed down, there is inevitably some change from that foggy morning that saw you off. You must let go of things to travel down a river.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/mekongsunset.jpg" width="286" height="200" class="postpicright" alt="Mekong Sunset, Laos" />And while a voice in the back of my head said just before I stepped off the boat in Luang Prabang, you cannot let go completely of anything, you will always have this thin strand of cotton wrapped about your smallest finger if for no other reason than to let it fall aside is to abandon hope entirely, I did, somewhere in the muddy waters of the Mekong, cast off huge chunks of myself, chunks that had been falling away for some time, but now perhaps because of the river, perhaps only the free and empty time, those chunks seemed to slough off at last. Most of these things that fell off me were too nebulous or vague to understand, I could not for instance say what I was letting go of or whether or not I would miss it, rather that the process of letting go was what was difficult. The thing or idea or dream was inevitably a product of my imagination, it had never been real to begin with, so letting go of **it** was natural, even if the process perhaps was not. 
+
+On the second day, after talking for a while with Siobhan about how dreams and traveling intermingle, I was in the ensuing silence suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps our dreams are ultimately acts of arrogance, or at least become so when we cling to them too tightly, cling to them until they do not guide us, but imprison us. Dreams must be cast off before reality is allowed to happen.
+
+Which is not to say my friends that a dream can not merge with reality, that they can not be one and same, but merely that they must be let go of in the mind before they will take shape in the world. It is perhaps the act of letting go that eliminates the certainties of cannot or will not, and replaces them with might, could and have; or, to put it in the vernacular of James Bond film titles, never say never.
+
+This feeling grew stronger and more disorienting when I fell ill with a bout of food poisoning. I lay on the floor of the guest house bathroom for the better part of two days vomiting horrible liquids out both ends of my digestive system, not a pleasant experience I can assure you, but somewhere in those tortured early morning hours, as I hugged the porcelain toilet that had become to sum total of my universe, it occurred to me how quickly our worlds can be reduced. Not just dreams we may try to let go of, but also our physical worlds and not only are we incapable of ever saying anything with certainty, we are incapable of even saying that. In other words, to say there is no certainty is itself a statement of certainty and therefore we find ourselves right where Joseph Heller so aptly described in *Catch-22*. 
+
+<break>
+Did I travel for two days down the Mekong River here to Luang Prabang? Is there a place where you still are, that I am not? Is there a place here that I am and you are not? Uncertainties I cannot wrap my still fevered brain around except to say that however the words might twist and turn like the Mekong, in the end they are the only things that make it real to me. 
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+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Hymn of the Big&nbsp;Wheel</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-19T19:37:46" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>19, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
+                <aside class="p-location h-adr adr post--location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <span class="p-region">Luang Prabang</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/laos/" title="travel writing from Lao (PDR)">Lao (PDR)</a>
+                </aside>
+            </header>
+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p><span class="drop">A</span> misty haze settles over the Mekong River Valley every evening; it begins to gather as an almost imperceptible smoke around sundown, the mountains begin to look farther away, less distinct and then it builds through the night reaching its apex somewhere in the "Bible black predawn" as Jeff Tweedy put it. </p>
+<p>The fog burns off by midmorning, noon at the latest, but for those of us already stirring, perhaps seated at breakfast, bundled in sweaters, the mist has a chill that seems to work its way through any number of carefully layered clothing. When the midday sun finally breaks through the last of the fog and is replaced by a shockingly sudden and intense heat, the sweaters and jackets are quickly shed in favor of short sleeves.</p>
+<p>I have been traveling with, as mentioned previously, Robin and Ofir, as well as a Scottish couple Phill and Lorraine, and an Austrian man named Harry, none of whom have left any inclination toward temples and stuppas, which I sympathize with and understand, once you have seen a couple of temples you have essentially seen them all, and yet I feel compelled to see them still.</p>
+<p><break>
+<amp-img alt="Temple, Luang Prabang, Laos" height="260" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/luangprabangtemple.jpg" width="195"></amp-img>So I set out alone to see some of the many temples dotted throughout Luang Prabang. As I could have predicted, the temples of Luang Prabang are more or less the same as the others I have seen in Chang Mai or Bangkok or Nepal or India or, well, visit enough temples, shrines, synagogues, churches or any other place a culture calls holy, and you'll quickly realize there is only one thing, call it what you will, only one thing, that dwarfs our existence. For some it may be god by any number of names, but for me it simply wonder, wonder that any of this could have happened, wonder that anything exists, let alone me and wonder that I and the rest of it continue to exist. </break></p>
+<p>After spending the better part of the morning at a few temples basking in this sense of wonder it seemed only natural to set aside the manmade and head to the natural, the source as it were.</p>
+<p>Robin and I teamed up with a fellow American, Ed, to rent a songthaew out to Tat Kung Si waterfall. The limestone riverbed below the main falls creates series of smaller cascades and the river lacks much in the way of banks; instead it spreads out and flows almost arbitrarily over the whole area wrapping around the trunks of trees and dodging obstructions on its way down to the Mekong. I don't know if it's the stone in the area or some mineral in the water, but the deeper pools that form beneath the falls were a brilliant turquoise color and perfect for swimming.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Tat Kung Si Falls, Laos" height="193" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/tatkungsifalls.jpg" width="250"></amp-img>After a very steep, abrupt and very pointless climb to the top of the highest falls which in the midday heat quickly reduced Robin and I to panting, sweat-soaked misery, we returned to the crystalline waters which had never looked so inviting. We swam for a while in the lower pools and I chatted with Ed, a semi professional photographer, about various photographic geekery which I hadn't thought about since I dropped my art major ten years ago.</p>
+<p>As luck would have it the pool we swam in had a nice tree extending out over it which allowed for excellent jumping and being the sort that still finds infinite pleasure in the simple act of hurling my body out into space, I made several jumps off the tree into the pool which did nothing to help the headache I already had.</p>
+<p>Later, after drying off, I sat at a picnic bench and ate lunch while the package tourists wandered by cameras dangling and with much pointing enthusiasm. I had heard so much about Luang Prabang before coming, everyone raved about it, but I have been somewhat disappointed. I imagine five years ago Luang Prabang was probably alright, but with the paving of highway 13 and the advent of an airport capable of international flights Luang Prabang has turned to yet another touristy trap, which is unfortunate, but seemingly unavoidable.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="River, Laos" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/laosriver.jpg" width="180"></amp-img>I decided to take an amphibious walk through the trees to see if perhaps I could clear such negative thoughts from my already overworked brain. It was slow going because of slickness of the limestone, but I managed to work my way downstream to an old water wheel now in a state of disrepair and obviously not used in ages. What struck me most though was that the water no longer flowed beneath the wheel so that even if it weren't falling apart it still wouldn't be able to turn. Lower down the stream I had taken a picture of another wheel, also not working, but still surrounded by water. I started to take a second picture of this wheel but for some reason I stopped. Instead I sat down on a small stone and watched the water swirl past me on either side, still thinking about the sense of wonder that arises whenever I stop to think about anything really.</p>
+<p>But this word wonder is not really what we're after is it? Too nebulous and vague, it could even be something like nostalgia, a failure of feeling, Wallace Stevens called it. No, what we are after is more specific than wonder, perhaps awe or amazement would be closer, perhaps it's a word that doesn't exist, perhaps Jewish mysticism is right after all, we have forgotten the true name of god, or possibly we never knew it. It may well be something that exists before language or beyond language or outside and removed from language altogether. And of course we know language has is shortcomings, the cynical like to remind us that the words are not the things, that words cannot express anything really, that they are a delicate web fabricated and sustained by nothing other than more words, but what else have we got?</p>
+<p>It could also be that the language is in fact that very thing that severed us from this lost word, perhaps language was once something other, not words that conveyed meaning, but sounds that made objects, a language not a reflection, but creation. Jose Saramago writes in <em>The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis</em> that the gods "journey like us in the river of things, differing from us only because we call them gods and sometimes believe in them."</p>
+<p>Sitting there in the middle of the river listening to the gurgle of water moving over stone and around trees I began to think that perhaps this is the sound of some lost language, a sound capable of creating mountains, valleys, estuaries, isthmuses and all the other forms around us, perhaps this is the sounds of what we feel, gurgling and sonorous but without clear meaning, shrouded in turquoise, a mystery through which we can move our sense of wonder intact.</p>
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+  "headline": "Hymn of the Big Wheel",
+  "datePublished": "2006-01-19T19:37:46+04:00",
+  "dateModified": "2006-01-19T19:37:46+04:00",
+  "author": {
+    "@type": "Person",
+    "name": "Scott Gilbertson"
+  },
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+  "description": "Sitting in the middle of the river listening to the gurgle of water moving over stone and around trees I began to think that perhaps this is the sound of some lost language, a sound capable of creating mountains, valleys, estuaries, isthmuses "
+}
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+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post-title" itemprop="headline">Hymn of the Big Wheel</h1>
+                
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+                <div class="p-location h-adr adr post-location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <h3 class="h-adr" itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"><span class="p-region" itemprop="addressRegion">Luang Prabang</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/laos/" title="travel writing from Lao (PDR)"><span itemprop="addressCountry">Lao (PDR)</span></a></h3>
+                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(19.827433510057354, 102.42279051308633, { type:'point', lat:'19.827433510057354', lon:'102.42279051308633'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
+                </div>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2006-01-19T19:37:46" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>19, 2006</span></time>
+                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
+                </div>
+            </header>
+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p><span class="drop">A</span> misty haze settles over the Mekong River Valley every evening; it begins to gather as an almost imperceptible smoke around sundown, the mountains begin to look farther away, less distinct and then it builds through the night reaching its apex somewhere in the &#8220;Bible black predawn&#8221; as Jeff Tweedy put it. </p>
+<p>The fog burns off by midmorning, noon at the latest, but for those of us already stirring, perhaps seated at breakfast, bundled in sweaters, the mist has a chill that seems to work its way through any number of carefully layered clothing. When the midday sun finally breaks through the last of the fog and is replaced by a shockingly sudden and intense heat, the sweaters and jackets are quickly shed in favor of short sleeves.</p>
+<p>I have been traveling with, as mentioned previously, Robin and Ofir, as well as a Scottish couple Phill and Lorraine, and an Austrian man named Harry, none of whom have left any inclination toward temples and stuppas, which I sympathize with and understand, once you have seen a couple of temples you have essentially seen them all, and yet I feel compelled to see them still.</p>
+<p><break>
+<img alt="Temple, Luang Prabang, Laos" class="postpicright" height="260" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/luangprabangtemple.jpg" width="195"/>So I set out alone to see some of the many temples dotted throughout Luang Prabang. As I could have predicted, the temples of Luang Prabang are more or less the same as the others I have seen in Chang Mai or Bangkok or Nepal or India or, well, visit enough temples, shrines, synagogues, churches or any other place a culture calls holy, and you&#8217;ll quickly realize there is only one thing, call it what you will, only one thing, that dwarfs our existence. For some it may be god by any number of names, but for me it simply wonder, wonder that any of this could have happened, wonder that anything exists, let alone me and wonder that I and the rest of it continue to exist. </p>
+<p>After spending the better part of the morning at a few temples basking in this sense of wonder it seemed only natural to set aside the manmade and head to the natural, the source as it were.</p>
+<p>Robin and I teamed up with a fellow American, Ed, to rent a songthaew out to Tat Kung Si waterfall. The limestone riverbed below the main falls creates series of smaller cascades and the river lacks much in the way of banks; instead it spreads out and flows almost arbitrarily over the whole area wrapping around the trunks of trees and dodging obstructions on its way down to the Mekong. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s the stone in the area or some mineral in the water, but the deeper pools that form beneath the falls were a brilliant turquoise color and perfect for swimming.</p>
+<p><img alt="Tat Kung Si Falls, Laos" class="postpic" height="193" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/tatkungsifalls.jpg" width="250"/>After a very steep, abrupt and very pointless climb to the top of the highest falls which in the midday heat quickly reduced Robin and I to panting, sweat-soaked misery, we returned to the crystalline waters which had never looked so inviting. We swam for a while in the lower pools and I chatted with Ed, a semi professional photographer, about various photographic geekery which I hadn&#8217;t thought about since I dropped my art major ten years ago.</p>
+<p>As luck would have it the pool we swam in had a nice tree extending out over it which allowed for excellent jumping and being the sort that still finds infinite pleasure in the simple act of hurling my body out into space, I made several jumps off the tree into the pool which did nothing to help the headache I already had.</p>
+<p>Later, after drying off, I sat at a picnic bench and ate lunch while the package tourists wandered by cameras dangling and with much pointing enthusiasm. I had heard so much about Luang Prabang before coming, everyone raved about it, but I have been somewhat disappointed. I imagine five years ago Luang Prabang was probably alright, but with the paving of highway 13 and the advent of an airport capable of international flights Luang Prabang has turned to yet another touristy trap, which is unfortunate, but seemingly unavoidable.</p>
+<p><img alt="River, Laos" class="postpicright" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/laosriver.jpg" width="180"/>I decided to take an amphibious walk through the trees to see if perhaps I could clear such negative thoughts from my already overworked brain. It was slow going because of slickness of the limestone, but I managed to work my way downstream to an old water wheel now in a state of disrepair and obviously not used in ages. What struck me most though was that the water no longer flowed beneath the wheel so that even if it weren&#8217;t falling apart it still wouldn&#8217;t be able to turn. Lower down the stream I had taken a picture of another wheel, also not working, but still surrounded by water. I started to take a second picture of this wheel but for some reason I stopped. Instead I sat down on a small stone and watched the water swirl past me on either side, still thinking about the sense of wonder that arises whenever I stop to think about anything really.</p>
+<p>But this word wonder is not really what we&#8217;re after is it? Too nebulous and vague, it could even be something like nostalgia, a failure of feeling, Wallace Stevens called it. No, what we are after is more specific than wonder, perhaps awe or amazement would be closer, perhaps it&#8217;s a word that doesn&#8217;t exist, perhaps Jewish mysticism is right after all, we have forgotten the true name of god, or possibly we never knew it. It may well be something that exists before language or beyond language or outside and removed from language altogether. And of course we know language has is shortcomings, the cynical like to remind us that the words are not the things, that words cannot express anything really, that they are a delicate web fabricated and sustained by nothing other than more words, but what else have we got?</p>
+<p>It could also be that the language is in fact that very thing that severed us from this lost word, perhaps language was once something other, not words that conveyed meaning, but sounds that made objects, a language not a reflection, but creation. Jose Saramago writes in <em>The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis</em> that the gods &#8220;journey like us in the river of things, differing from us only because we call them gods and sometimes believe in them.&#8221;</p>
+<p>Sitting there in the middle of the river listening to the gurgle of water moving over stone and around trees I began to think that perhaps this is the sound of some lost language, a sound capable of creating mountains, valleys, estuaries, isthmuses and all the other forms around us, perhaps this is the sounds of what we feel, gurgling and sonorous but without clear meaning, shrouded in turquoise, a mystery through which we can move our sense of wonder intact.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f65f63a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+Hymn of the Big Wheel
+=====================
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/hymn-big-wheel>
+    Thursday, 19 January 2006
+
+<span class="drop">A</span> misty haze settles over the Mekong River Valley every evening; it begins to gather as an almost imperceptible smoke around sundown, the mountains begin to look farther away, less distinct and then it builds through the night reaching its apex somewhere in the "Bible black predawn" as Jeff Tweedy put it. 
+
+The fog burns off by midmorning, noon at the latest, but for those of us already stirring, perhaps seated at breakfast, bundled in sweaters, the mist has a chill that seems to work its way through any number of carefully layered clothing. When the midday sun finally breaks through the last of the fog and is replaced by a shockingly sudden and intense heat, the sweaters and jackets are quickly shed in favor of short sleeves.
+
+I have been traveling with, as mentioned previously, Robin and Ofir, as well as a Scottish couple Phill and Lorraine, and an Austrian man named Harry, none of whom have left any inclination toward temples and stuppas, which I sympathize with and understand, once you have seen a couple of temples you have essentially seen them all, and yet I feel compelled to see them still.
+
+<break>
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/luangprabangtemple.jpg" width="195" height="260" class="postpicright" alt="Temple, Luang Prabang, Laos" />So I set out alone to see some of the many temples dotted throughout Luang Prabang. As I could have predicted, the temples of Luang Prabang are more or less the same as the others I have seen in Chang Mai or Bangkok or Nepal or India or, well, visit enough temples, shrines, synagogues, churches or any other place a culture calls holy, and you'll quickly realize there is only one thing, call it what you will, only one thing, that dwarfs our existence. For some it may be god by any number of names, but for me it simply wonder, wonder that any of this could have happened, wonder that anything exists, let alone me and wonder that I and the rest of it continue to exist. 
+
+After spending the better part of the morning at a few temples basking in this sense of wonder it seemed only natural to set aside the manmade and head to the natural, the source as it were.
+
+Robin and I teamed up with a fellow American, Ed, to rent a songthaew out to Tat Kung Si waterfall. The limestone riverbed below the main falls creates series of smaller cascades and the river lacks much in the way of banks; instead it spreads out and flows almost arbitrarily over the whole area wrapping around the trunks of trees and dodging obstructions on its way down to the Mekong. I don't know if it's the stone in the area or some mineral in the water, but the deeper pools that form beneath the falls were a brilliant turquoise color and perfect for swimming.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/tatkungsifalls.jpg" width="250" height="193" class="postpic" alt="Tat Kung Si Falls, Laos" />After a very steep, abrupt and very pointless climb to the top of the highest falls which in the midday heat quickly reduced Robin and I to panting, sweat-soaked misery, we returned to the crystalline waters which had never looked so inviting. We swam for a while in the lower pools and I chatted with Ed, a semi professional photographer, about various photographic geekery which I hadn't thought about since I dropped my art major ten years ago.
+
+As luck would have it the pool we swam in had a nice tree extending out over it which allowed for excellent jumping and being the sort that still finds infinite pleasure in the simple act of hurling my body out into space, I made several jumps off the tree into the pool which did nothing to help the headache I already had.
+
+Later, after drying off, I sat at a picnic bench and ate lunch while the package tourists wandered by cameras dangling and with much pointing enthusiasm. I had heard so much about Luang Prabang before coming, everyone raved about it, but I have been somewhat disappointed. I imagine five years ago Luang Prabang was probably alright, but with the paving of highway 13 and the advent of an airport capable of international flights Luang Prabang has turned to yet another touristy trap, which is unfortunate, but seemingly unavoidable.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/laosriver.jpg" width="180" height="240" class="postpicright" alt="River, Laos" />I decided to take an amphibious walk through the trees to see if perhaps I could clear such negative thoughts from my already overworked brain. It was slow going because of slickness of the limestone, but I managed to work my way downstream to an old water wheel now in a state of disrepair and obviously not used in ages. What struck me most though was that the water no longer flowed beneath the wheel so that even if it weren't falling apart it still wouldn't be able to turn. Lower down the stream I had taken a picture of another wheel, also not working, but still surrounded by water. I started to take a second picture of this wheel but for some reason I stopped. Instead I sat down on a small stone and watched the water swirl past me on either side, still thinking about the sense of wonder that arises whenever I stop to think about anything really.
+
+But this word wonder is not really what we're after is it? Too nebulous and vague, it could even be something like nostalgia, a failure of feeling, Wallace Stevens called it. No, what we are after is more specific than wonder, perhaps awe or amazement would be closer, perhaps it's a word that doesn't exist, perhaps Jewish mysticism is right after all, we have forgotten the true name of god, or possibly we never knew it. It may well be something that exists before language or beyond language or outside and removed from language altogether. And of course we know language has is shortcomings, the cynical like to remind us that the words are not the things, that words cannot express anything really, that they are a delicate web fabricated and sustained by nothing other than more words, but what else have we got?
+
+It could also be that the language is in fact that very thing that severed us from this lost word, perhaps language was once something other, not words that conveyed meaning, but sounds that made objects, a language not a reflection, but creation. Jose Saramago writes in *The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis* that the gods "journey like us in the river of things, differing from us only because we call them gods and sometimes believe in them."
+
+Sitting there in the middle of the river listening to the gurgle of water moving over stone and around trees I began to think that perhaps this is the sound of some lost language, a sound capable of creating mountains, valleys, estuaries, isthmuses and all the other forms around us, perhaps this is the sounds of what we feel, gurgling and sonorous but without clear meaning, shrouded in turquoise, a mystery through which we can move our sense of wonder intact.
diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.amp
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c89392e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.amp
@@ -0,0 +1,187 @@
+
+
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+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">I Used to Fly Like Peter&nbsp;Pan</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-21T19:42:47" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>21, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
+                <aside class="p-location h-adr adr post--location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <span class="p-region">Luang Nam Tha</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/laos/" title="travel writing from Lao (PDR)">Lao (PDR)</a>
+                </aside>
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+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p class="update">[Update (09/26/06): Many thanks to Ray who left the current link to <a href="http://www.gibbonx.org/index.php" title="The Gibbon Experience">The Gibbon Experience Website</a> in the comments below. One assumes that the contact form on their site is working...]</p>
+<p class="update">[Update (7/31/06): For those of you wanting to do this trek... We arranged things from Luang Prabang via email (<a href="http://www.gibbonx.org/gibbon_contact.php" title="contact the gibbon experience">they have several addresses on this page</a>). Some people have reported that the gibbon experience email address is not working... your mileage may vary. They do actually have an office in Huay Xai, Laos on the main street near the ferry to Thailand. If you're crossing over from Thailand walk up the sloped driveway and hang a left. It's about three doors down on the left (by the way all those people selling you boat tickets along the way are generally a rip off, hitch a ride over to the actual dock and you'll pay less). Sorry that's all the information I have. If you know something more I left to comments open below, feel free to add knowledge.]</p>
+<p><span class="drop">T</span>he next time someone asks you, "would you like to live in a tree house and travel five hundred feet above the ground attached to a zip wire?" I highly suggest you say, "yes, where do a I sign up?"</p>
+<p>In my case the signing up happened via email over the internet with a semi-mysterious word-of-mouth-only outfit known as The Gibbon Experience. Luckily Robin was familiar with the Gibbon Experience and insisted that we go and check it out. The journey into the northern part of Laos began inauspiciously at the Luang Prabang bus station where, after waiting three hours, we discovered we had been sold tickets to a bus that was already full. Owing to a lack of time (we needed to be in specific place at a specific time in order to be picked up by the Gibbon Experience truck), we were forced to charter a mini bus from Luang Prabang to Laung Nam Tha. Although not cheap, the mini bus did have one nice part, we got to travel at night and have the next day free to explore Laung Nam Tha. Regrettably there isn't much to see in Luang Nam Tha, it's a rather small town on the banks of the Nam Tha River and not much seems to happen there except for the occasional wedding. </p>
+<p><break>
+With the exception of route 13, which runs from the far south up to Pak Mong in the North, there are no paved roads in Laos. Thus travel beyond Laung Nam Tha is a fairly arduous, and in the dry season, dusty journey, which is better than the wet season when the roads are impassible. We could have chartered another mini bus, but we decided it would be more fun to take the local bus the rest of the way. The next morning at about six AM Robin and I bought tickets for the bus to Huay Xai and had a woman at our guest house write the name of the small village where we would get off in Lao. After packing up and catching a quick breakfast, we hoped on the bus and handed the sheet of paper to the driver who kind of nodded vaguely. The bus rarely got above 30km/hr, which, having since then ridden on many a local bus in Laos, I can now say is normal. At some point, coming down a fairly steep incline, I turned around to see how my travel companions were fairing and found the visibility inside the bus was limited to about 1 meter, after which everything vanished in an impenetrable mustard yellow cloud of dust. </break></p>
+<p><amp-img alt="unknown village Laos" height="119" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbonvillage.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>When we finally disembarked at the small village the three of us looked like old men, hair and skin silvered with dust and clothes decided more brown than not.  After we straightened out some accommodations with a local family, we deposited our backpacks in their living room and, with the help of the local children, made down to the river where we swam for a while, trying in vain to get the dust off our bodies. Later, after watching the sunset over the hills opposite the river, we had dinner on the porch with the Lao family hosting us. The most common food in Laos is sticky rice and though we did not know it then, that meal marked the beginning an eight-day stretch in which we would eat sticky rice (along with a variety of vegetables) for every meal. Luckily I like sticky rice; Ofir and Robin were decidedly less thrilled with the food. </p>
+<p>The next morning after breakfast, a slightly disconcerting meal that was suspiciously similar to dinner and since it was served cold, I could only assume it was in fact dinner; two trucks pulled into the village with the rest of the people for the trek.<amp-img alt="Strangler Fig Treehouse, Laos" height="252" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbontree.jpg" width="189"></amp-img> Because the tree houses have a limited amount of space, the Gibbon Experience takes only twelve people at a time into the jungle. After meeting the rest of the group (who were traveling from Huay Xui at the other end of the long dusty road), we traveled about two hours up a smaller and even worse road to another village. From there we hiked for roughly two hours to reach the first zip line and tree house. The next tree house was connected to the first by a series of zip lines running through and over the jungle canopy; the highest ran about one hundred fifty meters (500 ft) above the ground. Luckily heights don't bother me, but some people in our group were clearly nervous the first day. As time went on most people adjusted or just learned to not look down and by the third day we were all zipping around for fun.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Treehouse One Gibbon experience, Laos" height="211" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbontreehouse1.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>The first night Ofir, Robin and I stayed in the main tree house along with three people from England, and a Scottish man, Donald. After watching the misty clouds form in the valleys below us and eating morning glory leaves with sticky rice, one of the volunteer guides from the Gibbon Experience came up to the tree house and we passed around a bottle of lao lao, which is a local rice whiskey. At some point one of the English lads came up with the idea of slowly cabling out to look at the stars. A few of us clipped onto the zip lines and slowly pulled ourselves out into the pitch black jungle to look up with the stars. As with the camel safari back in India, there were more stars than I have ever seen, and again the giant clouds of the Milky Way were visible with the naked eye, but this time I was seeing it suspended from a wire forty meters in the air. I actually pulled myself all the way over to the hillside opposite the tree house and stood for a while in the darkness of the forest listening to various animals rustling about in the leaves and thinking about the now endangered tigers that may or may not have been lurking close by. Eventually when the mosquitoes found me I took a running leap off the platform and into the complete darkness of the jungle, zipping back toward the warm orange glow of the tree house.</p>
+<p>The next day a few people decided to go for a hike to the unfinished fourth tree house which overlooks a waterfall. Having had my fill of waterfalls in Luang Prabang, I decided to lounge around the tree house and get a little writing done. Ofir, one of the girls that works for the Gibbon Experience, and I sat around the tree house most of the morning sharing travel stories and recommendations until a curious creature showed up on one of the extending limbs of the tree. The animal was about the size of a large raccoon with the body and movements of squirrel. According to the girl, who had been there for six months, even the folks at the Gibbon Experience aren't sure what this animal is called. <amp-img alt="Unknown Creature, Laos" height="143" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibboncreature.jpg" width="190"></amp-img>The Lao have a word for it, which I can neither pronounce nor spell, but no one seems to know the species name or any English common name for it. If anyone out there recognizes this animal or knows someone who might, <a href="http://www.luxagraf.com/travel/contact/" title="Contact Form">contact me</a> since the folks at the Gibbon Experience would like to know what it's called as well. And just for the record, no it wasn't <strong>that</strong> close to me, the close up photograph was taken by pointing my camera lens into the eyepiece of a 75X spotting scope.</p>
+<p>For the second night Robin, Ofir and I moved to the smaller and more isolated tree house two. Located about halfway down a long ridge, tree house two has a more commanding view of the surrounding wilderness. It's also only a twenty-minute walk from tree house three where everybody went to watch the sunset. Walking back in the rapidly approaching darkness was a bit eerie since we all knew from talking to the guides that dusk is the tigers' favorite hunting time. We never saw any tigers nor any signs of them, but something attacked the pig which lives under tree house one, though it didn't manage to kill it. The other thing was never saw were the namesake black gibbons, though we did hear them singing in the mornings and evenings. </p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Zip Lines, Jungle, Laos" height="224" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbonzip.jpg" width="180"></amp-img>The Gibbon Experience was by far the best thing I've done so far in my travels and if you ever happen to pass through Huay Xai, Laos I highly recommend it (the office is just up the hill from immigration on your left). So far the project exists solely by word of mouth and even somehow managed to stay out of the Lonely Planet Guidebook. At some point in the next two years the Gibbon Experience will be turned over to the local people who are being trained and supported for now by three volunteers and the French man who started the whole thing. Hopefully it will, as it was intended to do, help show the local villages that sustainable long-term use of the forest is in end more beneficial than the logging and poaching on which much of the local economy currently depends.</p>
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+                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(20.853678554651314, 101.19094847224211, { type:'point', lat:'20.853678554651314', lon:'101.19094847224211'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
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+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2006-01-21T19:42:47" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>21, 2006</span></time>
+                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
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+            <p class="update">[Update (09/26/06): Many thanks to Ray who left the current link to <a href="http://www.gibbonx.org/index.php" title="The Gibbon Experience">The Gibbon Experience Website</a> in the comments below. One assumes that the contact form on their site is working&#8230;]</p>
+
+<p class="update">[Update (7/31/06): For those of you wanting to do this trek&#8230; We arranged things from Luang Prabang via email (<a href="http://www.gibbonx.org/gibbon_contact.php" title="contact the gibbon experience">they have several addresses on this page</a>). Some people have reported that the gibbon experience email address is not working&#8230; your mileage may vary. They do actually have an office in Huay Xai, Laos on the main street near the ferry to Thailand. If you&#8217;re crossing over from Thailand walk up the sloped driveway and hang a left. It&#8217;s about three doors down on the left (by the way all those people selling you boat tickets along the way are generally a rip off, hitch a ride over to the actual dock and you&#8217;ll pay less). Sorry that&#8217;s all the information I have. If you know something more I left to comments open below, feel free to add knowledge.]</p>
+
+<p><span class="drop">T</span>he next time someone asks you, &#8220;would you like to live in a tree house and travel five hundred feet above the ground attached to a zip wire?&#8221; I highly suggest you say, &#8220;yes, where do a I sign up?&#8221;</p>
+<p>In my case the signing up happened via email over the internet with a semi-mysterious word-of-mouth-only outfit known as The Gibbon Experience. Luckily Robin was familiar with the Gibbon Experience and insisted that we go and check it out. The journey into the northern part of Laos began inauspiciously at the Luang Prabang bus station where, after waiting three hours, we discovered we had been sold tickets to a bus that was already full. Owing to a lack of time (we needed to be in specific place at a specific time in order to be picked up by the Gibbon Experience truck), we were forced to charter a mini bus from Luang Prabang to Laung Nam Tha. Although not cheap, the mini bus did have one nice part, we got to travel at night and have the next day free to explore Laung Nam Tha. Regrettably there isn&#8217;t much to see in Luang Nam Tha, it&#8217;s a rather small town on the banks of the Nam Tha River and not much seems to happen there except for the occasional wedding. </p>
+<p><break>
+With the exception of route 13, which runs from the far south up to Pak Mong in the North, there are no paved roads in Laos. Thus travel beyond Laung Nam Tha is a fairly arduous, and in the dry season, dusty journey, which is better than the wet season when the roads are impassible. We could have chartered another mini bus, but we decided it would be more fun to take the local bus the rest of the way. The next morning at about six AM Robin and I bought tickets for the bus to Huay Xai and had a woman at our guest house write the name of the small village where we would get off in Lao. After packing up and catching a quick breakfast, we hoped on the bus and handed the sheet of paper to the driver who kind of nodded vaguely. The bus rarely got above 30km/hr, which, having since then ridden on many a local bus in Laos, I can now say is normal. At some point, coming down a fairly steep incline, I turned around to see how my travel companions were fairing and found the visibility inside the bus was limited to about 1 meter, after which everything vanished in an impenetrable mustard yellow cloud of dust. </p>
+<p><img alt="unknown village Laos" class="postpic" height="119" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbonvillage.jpg" width="200"/>When we finally disembarked at the small village the three of us looked like old men, hair and skin silvered with dust and clothes decided more brown than not.  After we straightened out some accommodations with a local family, we deposited our backpacks in their living room and, with the help of the local children, made down to the river where we swam for a while, trying in vain to get the dust off our bodies. Later, after watching the sunset over the hills opposite the river, we had dinner on the porch with the Lao family hosting us. The most common food in Laos is sticky rice and though we did not know it then, that meal marked the beginning an eight-day stretch in which we would eat sticky rice (along with a variety of vegetables) for every meal. Luckily I like sticky rice; Ofir and Robin were decidedly less thrilled with the food. </p>
+<p>The next morning after breakfast, a slightly disconcerting meal that was suspiciously similar to dinner and since it was served cold, I could only assume it was in fact dinner; two trucks pulled into the village with the rest of the people for the trek.<img alt="Strangler Fig Treehouse, Laos" class="postpicright" height="252" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbontree.jpg" width="189"/> Because the tree houses have a limited amount of space, the Gibbon Experience takes only twelve people at a time into the jungle. After meeting the rest of the group (who were traveling from Huay Xui at the other end of the long dusty road), we traveled about two hours up a smaller and even worse road to another village. From there we hiked for roughly two hours to reach the first zip line and tree house. The next tree house was connected to the first by a series of zip lines running through and over the jungle canopy; the highest ran about one hundred fifty meters (500 ft) above the ground. Luckily heights don&#8217;t bother me, but some people in our group were clearly nervous the first day. As time went on most people adjusted or just learned to not look down and by the third day we were all zipping around for fun.</p>
+<p><img alt="Treehouse One Gibbon experience, Laos" class="postpic" height="211" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbontreehouse1.jpg" width="200"/>The first night Ofir, Robin and I stayed in the main tree house along with three people from England, and a Scottish man, Donald. After watching the misty clouds form in the valleys below us and eating morning glory leaves with sticky rice, one of the volunteer guides from the Gibbon Experience came up to the tree house and we passed around a bottle of lao lao, which is a local rice whiskey. At some point one of the English lads came up with the idea of slowly cabling out to look at the stars. A few of us clipped onto the zip lines and slowly pulled ourselves out into the pitch black jungle to look up with the stars. As with the camel safari back in India, there were more stars than I have ever seen, and again the giant clouds of the Milky Way were visible with the naked eye, but this time I was seeing it suspended from a wire forty meters in the air. I actually pulled myself all the way over to the hillside opposite the tree house and stood for a while in the darkness of the forest listening to various animals rustling about in the leaves and thinking about the now endangered tigers that may or may not have been lurking close by. Eventually when the mosquitoes found me I took a running leap off the platform and into the complete darkness of the jungle, zipping back toward the warm orange glow of the tree house.</p>
+<p>The next day a few people decided to go for a hike to the unfinished fourth tree house which overlooks a waterfall. Having had my fill of waterfalls in Luang Prabang, I decided to lounge around the tree house and get a little writing done. Ofir, one of the girls that works for the Gibbon Experience, and I sat around the tree house most of the morning sharing travel stories and recommendations until a curious creature showed up on one of the extending limbs of the tree. The animal was about the size of a large raccoon with the body and movements of squirrel. According to the girl, who had been there for six months, even the folks at the Gibbon Experience aren&#8217;t sure what this animal is called. <img alt="Unknown Creature, Laos" class="postpicright" height="143" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibboncreature.jpg" width="190"/>The Lao have a word for it, which I can neither pronounce nor spell, but no one seems to know the species name or any English common name for it. If anyone out there recognizes this animal or knows someone who might, <a href="http://www.luxagraf.com/travel/contact/" title="Contact Form">contact me</a> since the folks at the Gibbon Experience would like to know what it&#8217;s called as well. And just for the record, no it wasn&#8217;t <strong>that</strong> close to me, the close up photograph was taken by pointing my camera lens into the eyepiece of a 75X spotting scope.</p>
+<p>For the second night Robin, Ofir and I moved to the smaller and more isolated tree house two. Located about halfway down a long ridge, tree house two has a more commanding view of the surrounding wilderness. It&#8217;s also only a twenty-minute walk from tree house three where everybody went to watch the sunset. Walking back in the rapidly approaching darkness was a bit eerie since we all knew from talking to the guides that dusk is the tigers&#8217; favorite hunting time. We never saw any tigers nor any signs of them, but something attacked the pig which lives under tree house one, though it didn&#8217;t manage to kill it. The other thing was never saw were the namesake black gibbons, though we did hear them singing in the mornings and evenings. </p>
+<p><img alt="Zip Lines, Jungle, Laos" class="postpic" height="224" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/gibbonzip.jpg" width="180"/>The Gibbon Experience was by far the best thing I&#8217;ve done so far in my travels and if you ever happen to pass through Huay Xai, Laos I highly recommend it (the office is just up the hill from immigration on your left). So far the project exists solely by word of mouth and even somehow managed to stay out of the Lonely Planet Guidebook. At some point in the next two years the Gibbon Experience will be turned over to the local people who are being trained and supported for now by three volunteers and the French man who started the whole thing. Hopefully it will, as it was intended to do, help show the local villages that sustainable long-term use of the forest is in end more beneficial than the logging and poaching on which much of the local economy currently depends.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d75cf90
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+I Used to Fly Like Peter Pan
+============================
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan>
+    Saturday, 21 January 2006
+
+<p class="update">[Update (09/26/06): Many thanks to Ray who left the current link to <a href="http://www.gibbonx.org/index.php" title="The Gibbon Experience">The Gibbon Experience Website</a> in the comments below. One assumes that the contact form on their site is working...]</p>
+
+<p class="update">[Update (7/31/06): For those of you wanting to do this trek... We arranged things from Luang Prabang via email (<a href="http://www.gibbonx.org/gibbon_contact.php" title="contact the gibbon experience">they have several addresses on this page</a>). Some people have reported that the gibbon experience email address is not working... your mileage may vary. They do actually have an office in Huay Xai, Laos on the main street near the ferry to Thailand. If you're crossing over from Thailand walk up the sloped driveway and hang a left. It's about three doors down on the left (by the way all those people selling you boat tickets along the way are generally a rip off, hitch a ride over to the actual dock and you'll pay less). Sorry that's all the information I have. If you know something more I left to comments open below, feel free to add knowledge.]</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="drop">T</span>he next time someone asks you, "would you like to live in a tree house and travel five hundred feet above the ground attached to a zip wire?" I highly suggest you say, "yes, where do a I sign up?"
+
+In my case the signing up happened via email over the internet with a semi-mysterious word-of-mouth-only outfit known as The Gibbon Experience. Luckily Robin was familiar with the Gibbon Experience and insisted that we go and check it out. The journey into the northern part of Laos began inauspiciously at the Luang Prabang bus station where, after waiting three hours, we discovered we had been sold tickets to a bus that was already full. Owing to a lack of time (we needed to be in specific place at a specific time in order to be picked up by the Gibbon Experience truck), we were forced to charter a mini bus from Luang Prabang to Laung Nam Tha. Although not cheap, the mini bus did have one nice part, we got to travel at night and have the next day free to explore Laung Nam Tha. Regrettably there isn't much to see in Luang Nam Tha, it's a rather small town on the banks of the Nam Tha River and not much seems to happen there except for the occasional wedding. 
+
+<break>
+With the exception of route 13, which runs from the far south up to Pak Mong in the North, there are no paved roads in Laos. Thus travel beyond Laung Nam Tha is a fairly arduous, and in the dry season, dusty journey, which is better than the wet season when the roads are impassible. We could have chartered another mini bus, but we decided it would be more fun to take the local bus the rest of the way. The next morning at about six AM Robin and I bought tickets for the bus to Huay Xai and had a woman at our guest house write the name of the small village where we would get off in Lao. After packing up and catching a quick breakfast, we hoped on the bus and handed the sheet of paper to the driver who kind of nodded vaguely. The bus rarely got above 30km/hr, which, having since then ridden on many a local bus in Laos, I can now say is normal. At some point, coming down a fairly steep incline, I turned around to see how my travel companions were fairing and found the visibility inside the bus was limited to about 1 meter, after which everything vanished in an impenetrable mustard yellow cloud of dust. 
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/gibbonvillage.jpg" width="200" height="119" class="postpic" alt="unknown village Laos" />When we finally disembarked at the small village the three of us looked like old men, hair and skin silvered with dust and clothes decided more brown than not.  After we straightened out some accommodations with a local family, we deposited our backpacks in their living room and, with the help of the local children, made down to the river where we swam for a while, trying in vain to get the dust off our bodies. Later, after watching the sunset over the hills opposite the river, we had dinner on the porch with the Lao family hosting us. The most common food in Laos is sticky rice and though we did not know it then, that meal marked the beginning an eight-day stretch in which we would eat sticky rice (along with a variety of vegetables) for every meal. Luckily I like sticky rice; Ofir and Robin were decidedly less thrilled with the food. 
+
+The next morning after breakfast, a slightly disconcerting meal that was suspiciously similar to dinner and since it was served cold, I could only assume it was in fact dinner; two trucks pulled into the village with the rest of the people for the trek.<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/gibbontree.jpg" width="189" height="252" class="postpicright" alt="Strangler Fig Treehouse, Laos" /> Because the tree houses have a limited amount of space, the Gibbon Experience takes only twelve people at a time into the jungle. After meeting the rest of the group (who were traveling from Huay Xui at the other end of the long dusty road), we traveled about two hours up a smaller and even worse road to another village. From there we hiked for roughly two hours to reach the first zip line and tree house. The next tree house was connected to the first by a series of zip lines running through and over the jungle canopy; the highest ran about one hundred fifty meters (500 ft) above the ground. Luckily heights don't bother me, but some people in our group were clearly nervous the first day. As time went on most people adjusted or just learned to not look down and by the third day we were all zipping around for fun.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/gibbontreehouse1.jpg" width="200" height="211" class="postpic" alt="Treehouse One Gibbon experience, Laos" />The first night Ofir, Robin and I stayed in the main tree house along with three people from England, and a Scottish man, Donald. After watching the misty clouds form in the valleys below us and eating morning glory leaves with sticky rice, one of the volunteer guides from the Gibbon Experience came up to the tree house and we passed around a bottle of lao lao, which is a local rice whiskey. At some point one of the English lads came up with the idea of slowly cabling out to look at the stars. A few of us clipped onto the zip lines and slowly pulled ourselves out into the pitch black jungle to look up with the stars. As with the camel safari back in India, there were more stars than I have ever seen, and again the giant clouds of the Milky Way were visible with the naked eye, but this time I was seeing it suspended from a wire forty meters in the air. I actually pulled myself all the way over to the hillside opposite the tree house and stood for a while in the darkness of the forest listening to various animals rustling about in the leaves and thinking about the now endangered tigers that may or may not have been lurking close by. Eventually when the mosquitoes found me I took a running leap off the platform and into the complete darkness of the jungle, zipping back toward the warm orange glow of the tree house.
+
+The next day a few people decided to go for a hike to the unfinished fourth tree house which overlooks a waterfall. Having had my fill of waterfalls in Luang Prabang, I decided to lounge around the tree house and get a little writing done. Ofir, one of the girls that works for the Gibbon Experience, and I sat around the tree house most of the morning sharing travel stories and recommendations until a curious creature showed up on one of the extending limbs of the tree. The animal was about the size of a large raccoon with the body and movements of squirrel. According to the girl, who had been there for six months, even the folks at the Gibbon Experience aren't sure what this animal is called. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/gibboncreature.jpg" width="190" height="143" class="postpicright" alt="Unknown Creature, Laos" />The Lao have a word for it, which I can neither pronounce nor spell, but no one seems to know the species name or any English common name for it. If anyone out there recognizes this animal or knows someone who might, <a href="http://www.luxagraf.com/travel/contact/" title="Contact Form">contact me</a> since the folks at the Gibbon Experience would like to know what it's called as well. And just for the record, no it wasn't **that** close to me, the close up photograph was taken by pointing my camera lens into the eyepiece of a 75X spotting scope.
+
+For the second night Robin, Ofir and I moved to the smaller and more isolated tree house two. Located about halfway down a long ridge, tree house two has a more commanding view of the surrounding wilderness. It's also only a twenty-minute walk from tree house three where everybody went to watch the sunset. Walking back in the rapidly approaching darkness was a bit eerie since we all knew from talking to the guides that dusk is the tigers' favorite hunting time. We never saw any tigers nor any signs of them, but something attacked the pig which lives under tree house one, though it didn't manage to kill it. The other thing was never saw were the namesake black gibbons, though we did hear them singing in the mornings and evenings. 
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/gibbonzip.jpg" width="180" height="224" class="postpic" alt="Zip Lines, Jungle, Laos" />The Gibbon Experience was by far the best thing I've done so far in my travels and if you ever happen to pass through Huay Xai, Laos I highly recommend it (the office is just up the hill from immigration on your left). So far the project exists solely by word of mouth and even somehow managed to stay out of the Lonely Planet Guidebook. At some point in the next two years the Gibbon Experience will be turned over to the local people who are being trained and supported for now by three volunteers and the French man who started the whole thing. Hopefully it will, as it was intended to do, help show the local villages that sustainable long-term use of the forest is in end more beneficial than the logging and poaching on which much of the local economy currently depends.
diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/index.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/index.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..015254b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/index.html
@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@
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+    <h1> Archive: January 2006</h1>
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+        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/01/i-used-fly-peter-pan" title="I Used to Fly Like Peter Pan">I Used to Fly Like Peter&nbsp;Pan</a> 
+            <time datetime="2006-01-21T19:42:47-05:00">Jan 21, 2006</time>
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+            <time datetime="2006-01-19T19:37:46-05:00">Jan 19, 2006</time>
+        </li> 
+        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/01/down-river" title="Down the River">Down the&nbsp;River</a> 
+            <time datetime="2006-01-17T20:13:26-05:00">Jan 17, 2006</time>
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+        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers" title="The King of Carrot Flowers">The King of Carrot&nbsp;Flowers</a> 
+            <time datetime="2006-01-17T18:53:17-05:00">Jan 17, 2006</time>
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+            <time datetime="2006-01-03T20:38:27-05:00">Jan 03, 2006</time>
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+        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/01/are-you-amplified-rock" title="Are You Amplified to Rock?">Are You Amplified to&nbsp;Rock?</a> 
+            <time datetime="2006-01-01T18:37:48-05:00">Jan 01, 2006</time>
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+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">The King of Carrot&nbsp;Flowers</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-17T18:53:17" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>17, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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+                    <span class="p-region">Doi Inthanan National Park</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand">Thailand</a>
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+            <p><span class="drop">T</span>he light outside the windows was still a pre-dawn inky blue when the freezing cold water hit my back. A cold shower at six thirty in the morning is infinitely more powerful, albeit not at long lasting, as a cup of coffee. After dropping my body temperature a few degrees and having no towel to dry off with, just a dirty shirt and ceaseless ceiling fan, a cup of tea seemed like a good idea so I stopped in at the restaurant downstairs and, after a cup of hot water with some Jasmine leaves swirling at the bottom of it, I climbed on my rental motorbike and set out for Doi Inthanan National Park.
+<break></break></p>
+<p>Normally such early morning antics are not part of my travel routine but it had already been made clear to me that if I hoped to make the 200 km journey to the highest point in Thailand in a single day, I had better start moving early. I rode out of Chiang Mai with painfully clenched fists and teeth that chattered uncontrollably at times, but the freedom of having my own transportation paled any discomforts the cold brought about. I had forgotten what freedom a vehicle of one's own can provide and I had never known the freedom that a motorbike provides. A motorbike, whether it be a clumsy scooter like mine or a more powerful, faster motorcycle, is to driving a car as body surfing is to using a board, without the board or the car there is in both case a kind intimacy with ones environment, the pavement, the curbs and lines of paint, the wind and the whip of passing cars and trucks, the grass growing in the cracks whizzing past below your feet, all of these things and a million other details you don't have the time to absorb become a symphony of movement not unlike the breaking of a wave or the rolling of distant thunder, a singular sensation which absorbs and is absorbed by your body whole and instantaneously and yet seems to stretch on forever.</p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Waterfall Doi Inthanan National Park Thailand" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/doifirstwaterfall.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>After a 60 or so kilometer ride on the main highway south of Chiang Mai I turned off onto the national park road and began to ascend through the dry grassy chaparral foothills and into the forest proper. My first stop was a small but peaceful waterfall. In fact nearly all my stops on the way to the summit were waterfalls except for one Karin village where I had lunch.</p>
+<p>My chief reason for coming to the park was the lady slipper orchid. There are many kinds of lady slipper orchids, which as you might imagine has a flower that resembled a lady's slipper, but the particular variety found here is only found here and nowhere else in the world (in the wild anyway).</p>
+<p>I don't know why I have become obsessed with orchids, but every since sitting at Jim Thompson's house staring at the that orchid, I have been studying up on them and wanting to see more of them. The previous day I rode the motorbike up to the Mae Sa Valley where there were a number of orchid farms and a very large botanical garden. It was at the Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden that I first read of the Lady Slipper Orchid that resides solely in Doi Inthanan National Park, and the specificity of such an ecological niche fascinated me. While wandering slowly through various greenhouses full of the same purple and orange and yellow orchids I had seen in Bangkok and elsewhere, I began to wonder why it was that some are right here, right everywhere, while others can require searches that lead to the far ends of the earth whether that be deep in the jungles of Thailand or the keys of Florida. What precisely is that drives evolution in such narrow back alleys that it can produce a plant on one mountain or one corner of a swamp and no other? Do all the pieces ultimately fit that tightly, and if they do then what does it mean when it turns out that the piece does not fit? What if the mountain changes, the icy northern glaciers begin to grow, the temperature drops and the orchid finds itself alone, stranded atop a mountain it never intended to climb?</p>
+<p>The basic orchid flower is composed of three sepals which make up the outer whorl, that region which we would generally think of as the flower, but then within this, if one studies the structure closer, that are three additional petals which form an inner whorl. The "medial" petal, which I have come to think of as the axis around which the rest of the petals turn, that lateral line which must be split, if only in the imagination, to arrival at the bilateral structure which I have previously written of, is usually modified and enlarged forming a tongue or lip-like platform for pollinators. The lady slipper belongs the family Pathiopedilum, in which the two lower sepals of the flower become fused together and the lip, instead of being flat, takes the form of a slipper. </p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Polished Rock Doi Inthanan National Park, Thailand" height="170" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/doirock.jpg" width="227"></amp-img>From the first waterfall where I lingered maybe an hour studying the water polished rocks along the shore of the river above the falls, I continued upward pausing at the Wachiratan waterfall. The Wachiratan falls were larger and generated a misty shroud of white around there base with rainbows arcing out through the white spray moving and receding as I walked about changing my angle from the sun. To escape from the chill of the spray I wandered down the riverbed among oaks and cashew trees with Tamarind trees reaching high into the sky and massive impenetrable stands of bamboo dark and foreboding in the growing afternoon shadows of the forest floor.</p>
+<p>I had the rather optimistic idea that perhaps I could find a Lady Slipper Orchid just clinging to a tree or sprouting out of a rock, but with a flower that rare, one does not just stumble across it. I tried without success to figure out why I even cared, there are after all billion and billions of flowers in the world, why did I care for this one? Perhaps the fascination in some way comes from the simple word slipper; it would not be the first time I had gone out of my way simply because of a well-chosen word. "Slipper" has a number of childhood connotations but perhaps the most obvious is Cinderella. And this connection is perhaps not entirely accidental since as we all know there was only one Cinderella, only one slipper, and so here, only one flower, only one mountain.</p>
+<p>Near the summit I paused to let some trucks pass and then waited a while not wanting to ride in the trail of exhaust they left behind. I sat on the bike staring at a pinkish leafed tree which stood out against the otherwise green hillsides. Behind the pink tree an afternoon thunder cloud drifted slowly by. The appeal I realized of Cinderella is the singularity of her existence. Just as this tree caught my eye because of its rarity, so to Cinderella captures our imagination because she is markedly different, rare we might say. And I understand the prince's obsession for once one has seen the rarist of flowers, the rest no longer hold sway. <amp-img alt="Pink Tree Doi Inthanan National Park, Thailand" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/doipinktree.jpg" width="159"></amp-img>We, like the prince, will move heaven and earth to find that which is rare and we cling to it, not unlike an orchid clings to a rock, once we have found it. And if we lose the rare things we seek it is not simply a brokenheartedness that follows, but a dissolution of life itself, as if, were the Lady Slipper to go extinct, what would be lost is not the personal, the plant, the flower, but the universal, the idea of the plant, the idea of the flower.</p>
+<p>At the summit I rested for a while beside a sign that read "The Highest Point in Thailand," which I did not realize was the case, and perhaps not without some irony, was clearly not the highest point in Thailand, which required a five minute walk up from the parking area to the summit of the hill. At the summit after guzzling a bottle of ice-cold water and studying the map for a while I headed back down to a checkpoint I had passed on the way up. This checkpoint according to my information had one of the rare lady slipper orchids growing on the back of the soldiers quarters which the rangers would be happy to show you, if you stopped to ask.</p>
+<p>It took only ten minutes of motorless gliding down the hill to reach the checkpoint where I inquired after the orchid. Unfortunately it turned out that the plant in question had died. With little time left before sunset I was forced to give up the search for the lady slipper orchid. I sat for a minute on the steps outside thinking what a different tale if Cinderella had never been found, if the prince simply wandered about forever clutching a glass slipper, never finding a foot that fit, until old and with a long beard perhaps, he wandered out of the Kingdom stopping perhaps at a checkpoint not unlike this one, not unlike the one Lao Tzu is said to have stopped at, where the guards said, please, could you write down what you know? To which the prince might well have answered simply, "I will never understand…"</p>
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+    <article class="h-entry hentry entry-content content" itemscope itemType="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">
+            <header id="header" class="post-header ">
+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post-title" itemprop="headline">The King of Carrot Flowers</h1>
+                <h2 class="post-subtitle">A Trip to the Top of Thailand</h2>
+                <div class="post-linewrapper">
+                <div class="p-location h-adr adr post-location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <h3 class="h-adr" itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"><span class="p-region" itemprop="addressRegion">Doi Inthanan National Park</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand"><span itemprop="addressCountry">Thailand</span></a></h3>
+                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(19.31503138144625, 98.84262083585055, { type:'point', lat:'19.31503138144625', lon:'98.84262083585055'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
+                </div>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2006-01-17T18:53:17" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>17, 2006</span></time>
+                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
+                </div>
+            </header>
+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p>The light outside was still the inky blue of pre-dawn when the freezing cold water hit my back. A cold shower at six-thirty in the morning is infinitely more powerful than a cup of coffee &#8212; especially when you have no towel to dry off with. </p>
+<p>After dropping my body temperature a few degrees drying off under the ceiling fan, a cup of tea seemed like a good idea so I stopped in at the restaurant downstairs and, after a cup of hot water with some Jasmine leaves swirling at the bottom of it, climbed on my crappy rental scooter and set out for Doi Inthanan National Park.</p>
+<div class="picwide">
+        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_51.jpg " title="view larger image">
+            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_51_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_51_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="me on a moped, thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_51.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
+        </a>
+</div>
+
+<p>I&#8217;m not normally much of a morning person, but I know if I wanted to ride the 200 km journey to the highest point in Thailand in a single day I had to start early. </p>
+<p>I rode out of Chiang Mai in the early morning chill. You don&#8217;t think of Thailand as cold, but it can be plenty cold up here in the mountains. I rode with fists clenched and teeth chattering uncontrollably, but the freedom of having my own transportation paled any discomforts the cold brought about.</p>
+<p>I had forgotten what freedom a vehicle of one&#8217;s own can provide and I had never known the freedom that a motorbike provides. A motorbike, whether it be a clumsy scooter like mine or a more powerful, faster motorcycle, is to driving a car as body surfing is to using a board. </p>
+<p>Without the surfboard or the car there is a greater intimacy with the environment. The pavement, the curbs and lines of paint, the wind and the whip of passing cars and trucks, the grass growing in the cracks whizzing past below your feet, all of these things and a million other details you don&#8217;t have the time to absorb become a symphony of movement not unlike the breaking of a wave, a singular sensation which absorbs and is absorbed by your body whole instantaneously and yet seems to stretch on forever.</p>
+<hr />
+
+<p>After a 60 or so kilometer ride on the main highway south of Chiang Mai I turned off onto the national park road and began to ascend through the dry grassy chaparral foothills and into the forest proper. My first stop was a small but peaceful waterfall. In fact nearly all my stops on the way to the summit were waterfalls except for one Karin village where I had lunch.</p>
+<div class="picwide">
+        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_21.jpg " title="view larger image">
+            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_21_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_21_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="waterfall doi inthanon national park thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_21.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
+        </a>
+</div>
+
+<div class="picwide">
+        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_22.jpg " title="view larger image">
+            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_22_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_22_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="rainbow doi inthanon national park thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_22.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
+        </a>
+</div>
+
+<div class="picwide">
+        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_06_OAYj1zV.jpg " title="view larger image">
+            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_06_OAYj1zV_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_06_OAYj1zV_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="colorful leaves, thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_06_OAYj1zV.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
+        </a>
+</div>
+
+<p>My chief reason for coming to the park was the lady slipper orchid. There are many kinds of lady slipper orchids, which as you might imagine has a flower that resembled a lady&#8217;s slipper, but the particular variety found here is only found here and nowhere else in the world (in the wild anyway).</p>
+<p>Ever since spending time with the orchids at Jim Thompson&#8217;s house, I have been studying up on them and wanting to see more. The previous day I rode the motorbike up to the Mae Sa Valley where there were a number of orchid farms and a very large botanical garden. </p>
+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_17_cm8HYOo.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class="pic66 "  src="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_17_cm8HYOo_pic66.jpg" alt="Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden, Mae sa valley, Thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_17_cm8HYOo.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_35.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class="pic66 "  src="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_35_pic66.jpg" alt="purple orchids, Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden, Mae sa valley, Thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_35.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+</span>
+
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_41.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class=" "  sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_41_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_41_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="Butterfly, Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden, Mae sa valley, Thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_41.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_49.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class=" "  sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_49_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_49_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="white orchids, Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden, Mae sa valley, Thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_49.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+</div>
+
+<p>It was at the Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden that I first read of the Lady Slipper Orchid that resides solely in Doi Inthanan National Park, and the specificity of such an ecological niche fascinated me. </p>
+<p>While wandering slowly through various greenhouses full of the same purple and orange and yellow orchids I had seen in Bangkok and elsewhere, I began to wonder why it was that some are right here, right everywhere, while other orchids require searches that lead to the far ends of the earth whether that be deep in the jungles of Thailand or the keys of Florida. </p>
+<p>What precisely is that drives evolution into such narrow back alleys that it can produce a plant on one mountain or one corner of a swamp and no other? Do all the pieces ultimately fit that tightly? If they do then what does it mean when it turns out that the piece does not fit? What if the mountain changes, the icy northern glaciers begin to grow, the temperature drops and the orchid finds itself alone, stranded atop a mountain it never intended to climb?</p>
+<p>The basic orchid flower is composed of three sepals which make up the outer whorl, the part we generally think of as the flower. Within this structure there are three additional petals which form an inner whorl. With in this is a tongue or lip-like platform for pollinators. The lady slipper belongs the family Pathiopedilum, in which the two lower sepals of the flower become fused together and the lip, instead of being flat, takes the form of a slipper. </p>
+<hr />
+
+<p>From the first waterfall where I lingered maybe an hour studying the water polished rocks along the shore of the river above the falls, I continued upward pausing at the Wachiratan waterfall. The Wachiratan falls were larger and engulfed in a misty shroud of white with rainbows arcing out through the spray, moving and receding as I walked around, changing my angle from the sun. </p>
+<p>To escape from the chill of the spray I wandered down the riverbed among oaks and cashew trees with Tamarind trees reaching high into the sky and massive impenetrable stands of bamboo dark and foreboding in the growing afternoon shadows of the forest floor.</p>
+<p>I had the rather optimistic idea that perhaps I could find a Lady Slipper Orchid clinging to a tree or sprouting out of a rock, but with a flower that rare, one does not just stumble across it. Somewhere along the way I discovered the road also led to the highest point in Thailand as well.</p>
+<p>Near the summit I paused to let some trucks pass and then waited a while not wanting to ride in the trail of exhaust they left behind. I sat on the bike staring at a pinkish leafed tree which stood out against the otherwise green hillsides. Behind the pink tree an afternoon thunder cloud drifted slowly by. </p>
+<p>At the summit I rested for a while beside a sign that read &#8220;The Highest Point in Thailand,&#8221; which was clearly not the highest point in Thailand. To get to that required a five minute walk up from the parking area to the summit of the hill. </p>
+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_42.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class="pic66 "  src="https://images.luxagraf.net/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_42_pic66.jpg" alt="sign marking the highest point in Thailand, with a hill and obviously higher point behind it photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_42.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_47.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class="pic66 "  src="https://images.luxagraf.net/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_47_pic66.jpg" alt="view from the highest point in Thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_47.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+</span>
+
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_39_9rPH8G7.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class=" "  sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_39_9rPH8G7_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_39_9rPH8G7_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="view from the highest point in Thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_39_9rPH8G7.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+
+
+    <a href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_45.jpg" title="view larger image ">
+        <img class=" "  sizes="(max-width: 1439px) 100vw, (min-width: 1440px) 1440px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_45_picwide-sm.jpg 720w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_45_picwide-med.jpg 1170w" alt="Me at the highest point in Thailand photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_45.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" ></a>
+
+
+</div>
+
+<p>At the summit after guzzling a bottle of ice-cold water and studying the map for a while I headed back down to a checkpoint I had passed on the way up. This checkpoint according to my information had one of the rare lady slipper orchids growing on the back of the soldiers quarters which the rangers would be happy to show you, if you stopped to ask.</p>
+<p>It took only ten minutes of motorless gliding down the hill to reach the checkpoint. I inquired after the orchid, but it turned out that the plant in question had died. With little time left before sunset I was forced to give up the search for a lady slipper orchid and head home.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,76 @@
+The King of Carrot Flowers
+==========================
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/king-carrot-flowers>
+    Tuesday, 17 January 2006
+
+The light outside was still the inky blue of pre-dawn when the freezing cold water hit my back. A cold shower at six-thirty in the morning is infinitely more powerful than a cup of coffee -- especially when you have no towel to dry off with. 
+
+After dropping my body temperature a few degrees drying off under the ceiling fan, a cup of tea seemed like a good idea so I stopped in at the restaurant downstairs and, after a cup of hot water with some Jasmine leaves swirling at the bottom of it, climbed on my crappy rental scooter and set out for Doi Inthanan National Park.
+
+
+<img src="images/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_51.jpg" id="image-2119" class="picwide" />
+
+I'm not normally much of a morning person, but I know if I wanted to ride the 200 km journey to the highest point in Thailand in a single day I had to start early. 
+
+I rode out of Chiang Mai in the early morning chill. You don't think of Thailand as cold, but it can be plenty cold up here in the mountains. I rode with fists clenched and teeth chattering uncontrollably, but the freedom of having my own transportation paled any discomforts the cold brought about.
+
+I had forgotten what freedom a vehicle of one's own can provide and I had never known the freedom that a motorbike provides. A motorbike, whether it be a clumsy scooter like mine or a more powerful, faster motorcycle, is to driving a car as body surfing is to using a board. 
+
+Without the surfboard or the car there is a greater intimacy with the environment. The pavement, the curbs and lines of paint, the wind and the whip of passing cars and trucks, the grass growing in the cracks whizzing past below your feet, all of these things and a million other details you don't have the time to absorb become a symphony of movement not unlike the breaking of a wave, a singular sensation which absorbs and is absorbed by your body whole instantaneously and yet seems to stretch on forever.
+
+<hr />
+
+After a 60 or so kilometer ride on the main highway south of Chiang Mai I turned off onto the national park road and began to ascend through the dry grassy chaparral foothills and into the forest proper. My first stop was a small but peaceful waterfall. In fact nearly all my stops on the way to the summit were waterfalls except for one Karin village where I had lunch.
+
+<img src="images/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_21.jpg" id="image-2120" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_22.jpg" id="image-2121" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_06_OAYj1zV.jpg" id="image-2118" class="picwide" />
+
+My chief reason for coming to the park was the lady slipper orchid. There are many kinds of lady slipper orchids, which as you might imagine has a flower that resembled a lady's slipper, but the particular variety found here is only found here and nowhere else in the world (in the wild anyway).
+
+Ever since spending time with the orchids at Jim Thompson's house, I have been studying up on them and wanting to see more. The previous day I rode the motorbike up to the Mae Sa Valley where there were a number of orchid farms and a very large botanical garden. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_17_cm8HYOo.jpg" id="image-2129" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_35.jpg" id="image-2130" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_41.jpg" id="image-2131" class="cluster picwide" />
+<img src="images/2006/Mae_Sa_Valley1_9_06_49.jpg" id="image-2132" class="cluster picwide" />
+</div>
+
+It was at the Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden that I first read of the Lady Slipper Orchid that resides solely in Doi Inthanan National Park, and the specificity of such an ecological niche fascinated me. 
+
+While wandering slowly through various greenhouses full of the same purple and orange and yellow orchids I had seen in Bangkok and elsewhere, I began to wonder why it was that some are right here, right everywhere, while other orchids require searches that lead to the far ends of the earth whether that be deep in the jungles of Thailand or the keys of Florida. 
+
+What precisely is that drives evolution into such narrow back alleys that it can produce a plant on one mountain or one corner of a swamp and no other? Do all the pieces ultimately fit that tightly? If they do then what does it mean when it turns out that the piece does not fit? What if the mountain changes, the icy northern glaciers begin to grow, the temperature drops and the orchid finds itself alone, stranded atop a mountain it never intended to climb?
+
+The basic orchid flower is composed of three sepals which make up the outer whorl, the part we generally think of as the flower. Within this structure there are three additional petals which form an inner whorl. With in this is a tongue or lip-like platform for pollinators. The lady slipper belongs the family Pathiopedilum, in which the two lower sepals of the flower become fused together and the lip, instead of being flat, takes the form of a slipper. 
+
+<hr />
+
+From the first waterfall where I lingered maybe an hour studying the water polished rocks along the shore of the river above the falls, I continued upward pausing at the Wachiratan waterfall. The Wachiratan falls were larger and engulfed in a misty shroud of white with rainbows arcing out through the spray, moving and receding as I walked around, changing my angle from the sun. 
+
+To escape from the chill of the spray I wandered down the riverbed among oaks and cashew trees with Tamarind trees reaching high into the sky and massive impenetrable stands of bamboo dark and foreboding in the growing afternoon shadows of the forest floor.
+
+
+I had the rather optimistic idea that perhaps I could find a Lady Slipper Orchid clinging to a tree or sprouting out of a rock, but with a flower that rare, one does not just stumble across it. Somewhere along the way I discovered the road also led to the highest point in Thailand as well.
+
+Near the summit I paused to let some trucks pass and then waited a while not wanting to ride in the trail of exhaust they left behind. I sat on the bike staring at a pinkish leafed tree which stood out against the otherwise green hillsides. Behind the pink tree an afternoon thunder cloud drifted slowly by. 
+
+At the summit I rested for a while beside a sign that read "The Highest Point in Thailand," which was clearly not the highest point in Thailand. To get to that required a five minute walk up from the parking area to the summit of the hill. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_42.jpg" id="image-2124" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2006/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_47.jpg" id="image-2127" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_39_9rPH8G7.jpg" id="image-2123" class="cluster picwide" />
+<img src="images/2019/Thailand-_Chiang_Mai_Doi_Inthanon_NP1_10_06_45.jpg" id="image-2125" class="cluster picwide" />
+</div>
+
+At the summit after guzzling a bottle of ice-cold water and studying the map for a while I headed back down to a checkpoint I had passed on the way up. This checkpoint according to my information had one of the rare lady slipper orchids growing on the back of the soldiers quarters which the rangers would be happy to show you, if you stopped to ask.
+
+It took only ten minutes of motorless gliding down the hill to reach the checkpoint. I inquired after the orchid, but it turned out that the plant in question had died. With little time left before sunset I was forced to give up the search for a lady slipper orchid and head home.
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+            <header id="header" class="post--header ">
+                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">You and I Are&nbsp;Disappearing</h1>
+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2006-01-12T00:52:30" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>12, 2006</span></time>
+            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
+                <aside class="p-location h-adr adr post--location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
+                    <span class="p-region">Chang Mai</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/thailand/" title="travel writing from Thailand">Thailand</a>
+                </aside>
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+        <div id="article" class="e-content entry-content post--body post--body--single" itemprop="articleBody">
+            <p><span class="drop">I</span> had been watching the eastern horizon for what felt like an hour, waiting for some perceptible change that would signal the coming of dawn, but it wasn't until after the bus stopped and my fellow passengers and I disembarked at the 7-11 next to the truck stop, that I finally noticed a slight glow. </p>
+<p>It had been, as Snoopy would say, a dark and stormy night, except that it wasn't stormy, it was simply dark. I have become completely incapable of sleeping in any sort of moving vehicle. When warping space through movement, time slows down and while this may sound metaphorical given that a bus does not move through space fast enough to <em>actually</em> slow down time, it is not. The two weeks I spent in Bangkok flew by, but when I am moving from place to place time always seems to slow down, and not just the actual traveling time, but all time, even that spent in a restaurant or at night in bed with a book; everything happens slower when you're traveling. </p>
+<p><break>
+I got off the bus and studied my fellow travelers many of whom I spent the last three hours observing in their sleep, comparing the personas I had invented for them while they slept with those they really possessed. I was tired, bleary-eyed tired, but for some reason unable to sleep. I spent most of the journey listening to my iPod with Daniel Carter's <em>Luminescence</em> looping over and over, which made a particularly compelling soundtrack to the passage of the darkness outside the window and the small beam of light on the highway in front of the bus. </break></p>
+<p>I bought a bottle of orange juice and sat down on the curb to watch the sunrise, but found my attention drawn instead to a dying moth fluttering about on its back making near perfect circles on the concrete. It continued without rest the entire time I sat there and seemed to me to signify something, though in my foggy sleep-deprived state, I could not say what it was the moth's movements meant to me, merely that they meant something.</p>
+<p>By the time we actually reached Chiang Mai it was well past dawn and the city just beginning to stir. After securing a room and depositing my belonging I considered trying to nap, but in the end decided to explore the town. What better way to see Buddhist temples than in the dreamy fog of sleeplessness? Chiang Mai has over three hundred wats within the somewhat sprawling city limits, most of them reasonablely modern and in my opinion not worth visiting. I narrowed the field to three, which I figured was a nice round one percent. </p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Wat Chiang Man, Chiang Mai, Thailand" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/chiangmaielephant.jpg" width="173"></amp-img>The most striking of the three was the oldest, wat Chiang Man from which Chiang Mai takes its name. The main stupha near the rear of the temple compound was a decaying edifice of what appeared to be limestone. The structure was about average in height, that is to say around 30 meters, and near the base a number of carved elephants jutted out. The stone was weathered black and splotchy from various lichens and mosses and of course the rain and pollution. I have no doubt it is earmarked for renovation, but I find that I enjoy crumbling, weather beaten temples more than those that have been carefully restored. Perhaps it is that the wear and tear of ages spent in the tropical sun lends some authenticity of age to stone, a reminder that these structures were around even when my own culture was still wearing its metaphorical diapers. I have always thought of the standard timeline of history as a circle viewed from the side, and from this perspective there is a backside to what we normally think of as the passage of time. Rather than moving forward down a line, events recede and grow closer as they move through time; the weathering of the stone elephants was to me a reminder of this two dimensional movement of time, as if the stone had not only passed along a line, but also moved forward and backward, picking up here and there a spot or streak of rain or growth of moss.</p>
+<p>While all of the wats were interesting in their own way, none compelled me to linger long and, finding myself at loose ends, I decided to ruin my round number and head to one more wat, wat Umong, located just outside the old city. I caught a ride with a songthaew (a truck taxi basically) to the entrance and wandered in. The main appeal of wat Umong was that, unlike the wats in the city, it sprawled out over a large forested hill. The forest reminded me a little of the area around Athens GA, but with no kudzu, a sort of forest I've never been able to put my finger on, not true jungle, but with lots of undergrowth and creeping vines crawling up the trunks of hardwood trees, and then broad leafed shrubs with white flowers, and an endless variety of ground cover much of it sprouting small purple flowers, even an orchid or two clinging to the trunk of an oak near the entrance; not what I would call jungle and not what I would call deciduous.</p>
+<p>Most wats have a central focal point, some particular image of Buddha or an old temple building or something that creates a locus around which everything else has been constructed, but wat Umong lacked that focal point entirely. Various paved trails took off in all directions and I could see a number of buildings poking their characteristic pointed roofs up into the branches of nearby trees. Toward the back of the wat was a network of tunnels quite obviously dug out by human means. According to the monks I spoke to no one knows who originally dug the caves; the local legend is that a solitary monk came here to meditate and created the place himself. <amp-img alt="Wat UMong, Chiang Mai, Thailand" height="174" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/watumongtunnel.jpg" width="172"></amp-img>And though there is no historical evidence to support that story, I couldn't help but thinking of that solitary and one might think, maybe a little crazy, monk digging these tunnels with his bare hands. Such thoughts made the otherwise rather sterile and plain tunnels invested with an idiosyncratic quality, as if perhaps this fictitious monk were trying to get at some point in the tunnels, not some physical thing, but rather convey some mood or meaning through design alone.</p>
+<p>Perhaps the reason wat Umong has no centrality is that the main image of Buddha at the wat is rather frightening looking and represents the Buddha at the end of one of his failed early attempts at enlightenment. For those that aren't familiar with the life of Buddha, Buddha tried unsuccessfully to reach enlightenment through various methods before he found the middle way as it is known. The method represented at wat Umong shows Buddha as an emaciated skeleton at the end of a long period of self-mortification. What was so striking about this statue once one gets past the near skeletal appearance of Buddha were the eyes which seemed to glow with, for lack of a better word, hunger. <amp-img alt="Emaciated Buddha, Wat Umong, Chiang Mai, Thailand" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/emaciatedbuddha.jpg" width="183"></amp-img>But not the calm sort of hunger that one might imagine the Buddha to have, this was more of a ravenous devouring and vaguely frightening hunger. The sort of piercing stare that threatens to engulf you when you step into it. </p>
+<p>After loitering for a while in the peripherals of Buddha's famished gaze I made my way down to a small pagoda near the fishpond where, as the sign near the entrance had claimed, there would be an informal discussion on Buddhism with a monk. Several other westerners slowly trickled down as the appointed time arrived, including an older American man I had spoken to earlier. He had asked where I was from and I generally just answer that with the last place I've lived, which as it turned out he had also lived in. We spoke for a while of weather and the Red Socks and other things only New Englanders really care about and then I had wandered off to explore.</p>
+<p>The session began slowly, no one wanted to ask any questions and my sleep-deprived mind was too slow to formulate anything intelligent enough to say out loud. For their part the monks were perfectly comfortable with the vast periods of silence which I could tell left many of those in attendance feeling a bit awkward. It's not often you meet people who are comfortable with long periods of silence. Eventually a few questions were voiced, mostly technical things like the difference between how monks practice Buddhism versus what you could call a layperson practices Buddhism, or what the goals of meditation are. I had a number of questions in my mind by then, but for some reason found myself unwilling to ask them. Part of me suspected that perhaps I did not really want to know the answers as the more I learn of Buddhism, the less I agree with it.</p>
+<p>No matter where the questions began, in the course of his response the monk kept coming back to the phrase "cause and effect," which in his pronunciation sounded more like "cause and affect." This slight semantic difference became somehow telling to me the more he repeated it, as if his own language were betraying him. I have struggled to understand Buddhism as it is practiced in Thailand since I arrived. Much of what I have seen at wats has been out of line with what I know of the Buddha's teachings and indeed the monks confirmed that as with any religion, many of those who follow Buddhism do not really practice what the Buddha taught. The chief thing the monk seemed concerned with was the relationship between the causes of action and effect of those actions. But his, and perhaps Buddhism's in general, interpretation of that relationship seemed to me woefully simplified.</p>
+<p>I kept wondering what Buddhism would say to a theory like chaos mathematics. I did not ask because really I did not want to know, I prefer to wonder about these sort of things rather than have any definitive answer, assuming a definitive answer to such a nebulous question were even possible. But I failed to see how one could ever really determine a relationship between cause and effect given that the chain of events that follow from any one thought or action are far too wide reaching, complicated and extensive for the human mind to keep track of, and even if we were able to follow the chain clearly, it is unlikely that just because one's intentions were good, that it necessarily follows that the outcome of those intentions are positive for all that end up being effected by it. </p>
+<p>Somewhere in the middle of the talk I realized that, while it may have betrayed my westernness in thinking so, I believe in randomness and ambiguity and patterns so complex as to be indecipherable and to try and find the order and meaning within them is to miss the point of their existence. There is actually a word for this idea, pareidolia, which means simply the fanciful perception of meaning in something that is actually ambiguous, and this is perhaps what troubled me about the monks ideas, not that they were wrong, but that they strove to remove all ambiguity from life. I thought again of the moth fluttering on the concrete; the pattern of his dying arcs could hold some meaning if I chose to attach one to the other, but at the same time, perhaps the deeper meaning lay with my own awareness that I was creating it. That is to say, perhaps the moth was simply dying and any connection beyond that was an act of my imagination, not something inherent in the moth's death, which isn't to say that that connection shouldn't be made, but merely to acknowledge that the connection arose from the imagination. </p>
+<p><amp-img alt="Umong fishpond, Chiang Mai, Thailand" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/umongfishpond.jpg" width="165"></amp-img>Eventually as new people arrived questions and answers began to repeat themselves and as discreetly as possible I slipped away and wandered down to the shores of the pond to watch the cumulous clouds forming over the distant hills. I sat for a while on a small bench near the shore thinking of the clouds and the patterns and shapes we sometimes see in them, which like the moth's circle are inventions of our mind at play. As I stood to walk home it occurred to me that perhaps that the joy of life is not to puzzle out the connections between things, but to play amongst them and with them.</p>
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+                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2006-01-12T00:52:30" itemprop="datePublished">January <span>12, 2006</span></time>
+                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
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+            <p><span class="drop">I</span> had been watching the eastern horizon for what felt like an hour, waiting for some perceptible change that would signal the coming of dawn, but it wasn&#8217;t until after the bus stopped and my fellow passengers and I disembarked at the 7-11 next to the truck stop, that I finally noticed a slight glow. </p>
+<p>It had been, as Snoopy would say, a dark and stormy night, except that it wasn&#8217;t stormy, it was simply dark. I have become completely incapable of sleeping in any sort of moving vehicle. When warping space through movement, time slows down and while this may sound metaphorical given that a bus does not move through space fast enough to <em>actually</em> slow down time, it is not. The two weeks I spent in Bangkok flew by, but when I am moving from place to place time always seems to slow down, and not just the actual traveling time, but all time, even that spent in a restaurant or at night in bed with a book; everything happens slower when you&#8217;re traveling. </p>
+<p><break>
+I got off the bus and studied my fellow travelers many of whom I spent the last three hours observing in their sleep, comparing the personas I had invented for them while they slept with those they really possessed. I was tired, bleary-eyed tired, but for some reason unable to sleep. I spent most of the journey listening to my iPod with Daniel Carter&#8217;s <em>Luminescence</em> looping over and over, which made a particularly compelling soundtrack to the passage of the darkness outside the window and the small beam of light on the highway in front of the bus. </p>
+<p>I bought a bottle of orange juice and sat down on the curb to watch the sunrise, but found my attention drawn instead to a dying moth fluttering about on its back making near perfect circles on the concrete. It continued without rest the entire time I sat there and seemed to me to signify something, though in my foggy sleep-deprived state, I could not say what it was the moth&#8217;s movements meant to me, merely that they meant something.</p>
+<p>By the time we actually reached Chiang Mai it was well past dawn and the city just beginning to stir. After securing a room and depositing my belonging I considered trying to nap, but in the end decided to explore the town. What better way to see Buddhist temples than in the dreamy fog of sleeplessness? Chiang Mai has over three hundred wats within the somewhat sprawling city limits, most of them reasonablely modern and in my opinion not worth visiting. I narrowed the field to three, which I figured was a nice round one percent. </p>
+<p><img alt="Wat Chiang Man, Chiang Mai, Thailand" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/chiangmaielephant.jpg" width="173"/>The most striking of the three was the oldest, wat Chiang Man from which Chiang Mai takes its name. The main stupha near the rear of the temple compound was a decaying edifice of what appeared to be limestone. The structure was about average in height, that is to say around 30 meters, and near the base a number of carved elephants jutted out. The stone was weathered black and splotchy from various lichens and mosses and of course the rain and pollution. I have no doubt it is earmarked for renovation, but I find that I enjoy crumbling, weather beaten temples more than those that have been carefully restored. Perhaps it is that the wear and tear of ages spent in the tropical sun lends some authenticity of age to stone, a reminder that these structures were around even when my own culture was still wearing its metaphorical diapers. I have always thought of the standard timeline of history as a circle viewed from the side, and from this perspective there is a backside to what we normally think of as the passage of time. Rather than moving forward down a line, events recede and grow closer as they move through time; the weathering of the stone elephants was to me a reminder of this two dimensional movement of time, as if the stone had not only passed along a line, but also moved forward and backward, picking up here and there a spot or streak of rain or growth of moss.</p>
+<p>While all of the wats were interesting in their own way, none compelled me to linger long and, finding myself at loose ends, I decided to ruin my round number and head to one more wat, wat Umong, located just outside the old city. I caught a ride with a songthaew (a truck taxi basically) to the entrance and wandered in. The main appeal of wat Umong was that, unlike the wats in the city, it sprawled out over a large forested hill. The forest reminded me a little of the area around Athens GA, but with no kudzu, a sort of forest I&#8217;ve never been able to put my finger on, not true jungle, but with lots of undergrowth and creeping vines crawling up the trunks of hardwood trees, and then broad leafed shrubs with white flowers, and an endless variety of ground cover much of it sprouting small purple flowers, even an orchid or two clinging to the trunk of an oak near the entrance; not what I would call jungle and not what I would call deciduous.</p>
+<p>Most wats have a central focal point, some particular image of Buddha or an old temple building or something that creates a locus around which everything else has been constructed, but wat Umong lacked that focal point entirely. Various paved trails took off in all directions and I could see a number of buildings poking their characteristic pointed roofs up into the branches of nearby trees. Toward the back of the wat was a network of tunnels quite obviously dug out by human means. According to the monks I spoke to no one knows who originally dug the caves; the local legend is that a solitary monk came here to meditate and created the place himself. <img alt="Wat UMong, Chiang Mai, Thailand" class="postpicright" height="174" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/watumongtunnel.jpg" width="172"/>And though there is no historical evidence to support that story, I couldn&#8217;t help but thinking of that solitary and one might think, maybe a little crazy, monk digging these tunnels with his bare hands. Such thoughts made the otherwise rather sterile and plain tunnels invested with an idiosyncratic quality, as if perhaps this fictitious monk were trying to get at some point in the tunnels, not some physical thing, but rather convey some mood or meaning through design alone.</p>
+<p>Perhaps the reason wat Umong has no centrality is that the main image of Buddha at the wat is rather frightening looking and represents the Buddha at the end of one of his failed early attempts at enlightenment. For those that aren&#8217;t familiar with the life of Buddha, Buddha tried unsuccessfully to reach enlightenment through various methods before he found the middle way as it is known. The method represented at wat Umong shows Buddha as an emaciated skeleton at the end of a long period of self-mortification. What was so striking about this statue once one gets past the near skeletal appearance of Buddha were the eyes which seemed to glow with, for lack of a better word, hunger. <img alt="Emaciated Buddha, Wat Umong, Chiang Mai, Thailand" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/emaciatedbuddha.jpg" width="183"/>But not the calm sort of hunger that one might imagine the Buddha to have, this was more of a ravenous devouring and vaguely frightening hunger. The sort of piercing stare that threatens to engulf you when you step into it. </p>
+<p>After loitering for a while in the peripherals of Buddha&#8217;s famished gaze I made my way down to a small pagoda near the fishpond where, as the sign near the entrance had claimed, there would be an informal discussion on Buddhism with a monk. Several other westerners slowly trickled down as the appointed time arrived, including an older American man I had spoken to earlier. He had asked where I was from and I generally just answer that with the last place I&#8217;ve lived, which as it turned out he had also lived in. We spoke for a while of weather and the Red Socks and other things only New Englanders really care about and then I had wandered off to explore.</p>
+<p>The session began slowly, no one wanted to ask any questions and my sleep-deprived mind was too slow to formulate anything intelligent enough to say out loud. For their part the monks were perfectly comfortable with the vast periods of silence which I could tell left many of those in attendance feeling a bit awkward. It&#8217;s not often you meet people who are comfortable with long periods of silence. Eventually a few questions were voiced, mostly technical things like the difference between how monks practice Buddhism versus what you could call a layperson practices Buddhism, or what the goals of meditation are. I had a number of questions in my mind by then, but for some reason found myself unwilling to ask them. Part of me suspected that perhaps I did not really want to know the answers as the more I learn of Buddhism, the less I agree with it.</p>
+<p>No matter where the questions began, in the course of his response the monk kept coming back to the phrase &#8220;cause and effect,&#8221; which in his pronunciation sounded more like &#8220;cause and affect.&#8221; This slight semantic difference became somehow telling to me the more he repeated it, as if his own language were betraying him. I have struggled to understand Buddhism as it is practiced in Thailand since I arrived. Much of what I have seen at wats has been out of line with what I know of the Buddha&#8217;s teachings and indeed the monks confirmed that as with any religion, many of those who follow Buddhism do not really practice what the Buddha taught. The chief thing the monk seemed concerned with was the relationship between the causes of action and effect of those actions. But his, and perhaps Buddhism&#8217;s in general, interpretation of that relationship seemed to me woefully simplified.</p>
+<p>I kept wondering what Buddhism would say to a theory like chaos mathematics. I did not ask because really I did not want to know, I prefer to wonder about these sort of things rather than have any definitive answer, assuming a definitive answer to such a nebulous question were even possible. But I failed to see how one could ever really determine a relationship between cause and effect given that the chain of events that follow from any one thought or action are far too wide reaching, complicated and extensive for the human mind to keep track of, and even if we were able to follow the chain clearly, it is unlikely that just because one&#8217;s intentions were good, that it necessarily follows that the outcome of those intentions are positive for all that end up being effected by it. </p>
+<p>Somewhere in the middle of the talk I realized that, while it may have betrayed my westernness in thinking so, I believe in randomness and ambiguity and patterns so complex as to be indecipherable and to try and find the order and meaning within them is to miss the point of their existence. There is actually a word for this idea, pareidolia, which means simply the fanciful perception of meaning in something that is actually ambiguous, and this is perhaps what troubled me about the monks ideas, not that they were wrong, but that they strove to remove all ambiguity from life. I thought again of the moth fluttering on the concrete; the pattern of his dying arcs could hold some meaning if I chose to attach one to the other, but at the same time, perhaps the deeper meaning lay with my own awareness that I was creating it. That is to say, perhaps the moth was simply dying and any connection beyond that was an act of my imagination, not something inherent in the moth&#8217;s death, which isn&#8217;t to say that that connection shouldn&#8217;t be made, but merely to acknowledge that the connection arose from the imagination. </p>
+<p><img alt="Umong fishpond, Chiang Mai, Thailand" class="postpicright" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/umongfishpond.jpg" width="165"/>Eventually as new people arrived questions and answers began to repeat themselves and as discreetly as possible I slipped away and wandered down to the shores of the pond to watch the cumulous clouds forming over the distant hills. I sat for a while on a small bench near the shore thinking of the clouds and the patterns and shapes we sometimes see in them, which like the moth&#8217;s circle are inventions of our mind at play. As I stood to walk home it occurred to me that perhaps that the joy of life is not to puzzle out the connections between things, but to play amongst them and with them.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8a5d7ae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+You and I Are Disappearing
+==========================
+
+    by Scott Gilbertson
+    </jrnl/2006/01/you-and-i-are-disappearing>
+    Thursday, 12 January 2006
+
+<span class="drop">I</span> had been watching the eastern horizon for what felt like an hour, waiting for some perceptible change that would signal the coming of dawn, but it wasn't until after the bus stopped and my fellow passengers and I disembarked at the 7-11 next to the truck stop, that I finally noticed a slight glow. 
+
+It had been, as Snoopy would say, a dark and stormy night, except that it wasn't stormy, it was simply dark. I have become completely incapable of sleeping in any sort of moving vehicle. When warping space through movement, time slows down and while this may sound metaphorical given that a bus does not move through space fast enough to *actually* slow down time, it is not. The two weeks I spent in Bangkok flew by, but when I am moving from place to place time always seems to slow down, and not just the actual traveling time, but all time, even that spent in a restaurant or at night in bed with a book; everything happens slower when you're traveling. 
+
+<break>
+I got off the bus and studied my fellow travelers many of whom I spent the last three hours observing in their sleep, comparing the personas I had invented for them while they slept with those they really possessed. I was tired, bleary-eyed tired, but for some reason unable to sleep. I spent most of the journey listening to my iPod with Daniel Carter's *Luminescence* looping over and over, which made a particularly compelling soundtrack to the passage of the darkness outside the window and the small beam of light on the highway in front of the bus. 
+
+I bought a bottle of orange juice and sat down on the curb to watch the sunrise, but found my attention drawn instead to a dying moth fluttering about on its back making near perfect circles on the concrete. It continued without rest the entire time I sat there and seemed to me to signify something, though in my foggy sleep-deprived state, I could not say what it was the moth's movements meant to me, merely that they meant something.
+
+By the time we actually reached Chiang Mai it was well past dawn and the city just beginning to stir. After securing a room and depositing my belonging I considered trying to nap, but in the end decided to explore the town. What better way to see Buddhist temples than in the dreamy fog of sleeplessness? Chiang Mai has over three hundred wats within the somewhat sprawling city limits, most of them reasonablely modern and in my opinion not worth visiting. I narrowed the field to three, which I figured was a nice round one percent. 
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/chiangmaielephant.jpg" width="173" height="230" class="postpic" alt="Wat Chiang Man, Chiang Mai, Thailand" />The most striking of the three was the oldest, wat Chiang Man from which Chiang Mai takes its name. The main stupha near the rear of the temple compound was a decaying edifice of what appeared to be limestone. The structure was about average in height, that is to say around 30 meters, and near the base a number of carved elephants jutted out. The stone was weathered black and splotchy from various lichens and mosses and of course the rain and pollution. I have no doubt it is earmarked for renovation, but I find that I enjoy crumbling, weather beaten temples more than those that have been carefully restored. Perhaps it is that the wear and tear of ages spent in the tropical sun lends some authenticity of age to stone, a reminder that these structures were around even when my own culture was still wearing its metaphorical diapers. I have always thought of the standard timeline of history as a circle viewed from the side, and from this perspective there is a backside to what we normally think of as the passage of time. Rather than moving forward down a line, events recede and grow closer as they move through time; the weathering of the stone elephants was to me a reminder of this two dimensional movement of time, as if the stone had not only passed along a line, but also moved forward and backward, picking up here and there a spot or streak of rain or growth of moss.
+
+While all of the wats were interesting in their own way, none compelled me to linger long and, finding myself at loose ends, I decided to ruin my round number and head to one more wat, wat Umong, located just outside the old city. I caught a ride with a songthaew (a truck taxi basically) to the entrance and wandered in. The main appeal of wat Umong was that, unlike the wats in the city, it sprawled out over a large forested hill. The forest reminded me a little of the area around Athens GA, but with no kudzu, a sort of forest I've never been able to put my finger on, not true jungle, but with lots of undergrowth and creeping vines crawling up the trunks of hardwood trees, and then broad leafed shrubs with white flowers, and an endless variety of ground cover much of it sprouting small purple flowers, even an orchid or two clinging to the trunk of an oak near the entrance; not what I would call jungle and not what I would call deciduous.
+
+Most wats have a central focal point, some particular image of Buddha or an old temple building or something that creates a locus around which everything else has been constructed, but wat Umong lacked that focal point entirely. Various paved trails took off in all directions and I could see a number of buildings poking their characteristic pointed roofs up into the branches of nearby trees. Toward the back of the wat was a network of tunnels quite obviously dug out by human means. According to the monks I spoke to no one knows who originally dug the caves; the local legend is that a solitary monk came here to meditate and created the place himself. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/watumongtunnel.jpg" width="172" height="174" class="postpicright" alt="Wat UMong, Chiang Mai, Thailand" />And though there is no historical evidence to support that story, I couldn't help but thinking of that solitary and one might think, maybe a little crazy, monk digging these tunnels with his bare hands. Such thoughts made the otherwise rather sterile and plain tunnels invested with an idiosyncratic quality, as if perhaps this fictitious monk were trying to get at some point in the tunnels, not some physical thing, but rather convey some mood or meaning through design alone.
+
+Perhaps the reason wat Umong has no centrality is that the main image of Buddha at the wat is rather frightening looking and represents the Buddha at the end of one of his failed early attempts at enlightenment. For those that aren't familiar with the life of Buddha, Buddha tried unsuccessfully to reach enlightenment through various methods before he found the middle way as it is known. The method represented at wat Umong shows Buddha as an emaciated skeleton at the end of a long period of self-mortification. What was so striking about this statue once one gets past the near skeletal appearance of Buddha were the eyes which seemed to glow with, for lack of a better word, hunger. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/emaciatedbuddha.jpg" width="183" height="240" class="postpic" alt="Emaciated Buddha, Wat Umong, Chiang Mai, Thailand" />But not the calm sort of hunger that one might imagine the Buddha to have, this was more of a ravenous devouring and vaguely frightening hunger. The sort of piercing stare that threatens to engulf you when you step into it. 
+
+After loitering for a while in the peripherals of Buddha's famished gaze I made my way down to a small pagoda near the fishpond where, as the sign near the entrance had claimed, there would be an informal discussion on Buddhism with a monk. Several other westerners slowly trickled down as the appointed time arrived, including an older American man I had spoken to earlier. He had asked where I was from and I generally just answer that with the last place I've lived, which as it turned out he had also lived in. We spoke for a while of weather and the Red Socks and other things only New Englanders really care about and then I had wandered off to explore.
+
+The session began slowly, no one wanted to ask any questions and my sleep-deprived mind was too slow to formulate anything intelligent enough to say out loud. For their part the monks were perfectly comfortable with the vast periods of silence which I could tell left many of those in attendance feeling a bit awkward. It's not often you meet people who are comfortable with long periods of silence. Eventually a few questions were voiced, mostly technical things like the difference between how monks practice Buddhism versus what you could call a layperson practices Buddhism, or what the goals of meditation are. I had a number of questions in my mind by then, but for some reason found myself unwilling to ask them. Part of me suspected that perhaps I did not really want to know the answers as the more I learn of Buddhism, the less I agree with it.
+
+No matter where the questions began, in the course of his response the monk kept coming back to the phrase "cause and effect," which in his pronunciation sounded more like "cause and affect." This slight semantic difference became somehow telling to me the more he repeated it, as if his own language were betraying him. I have struggled to understand Buddhism as it is practiced in Thailand since I arrived. Much of what I have seen at wats has been out of line with what I know of the Buddha's teachings and indeed the monks confirmed that as with any religion, many of those who follow Buddhism do not really practice what the Buddha taught. The chief thing the monk seemed concerned with was the relationship between the causes of action and effect of those actions. But his, and perhaps Buddhism's in general, interpretation of that relationship seemed to me woefully simplified.
+
+I kept wondering what Buddhism would say to a theory like chaos mathematics. I did not ask because really I did not want to know, I prefer to wonder about these sort of things rather than have any definitive answer, assuming a definitive answer to such a nebulous question were even possible. But I failed to see how one could ever really determine a relationship between cause and effect given that the chain of events that follow from any one thought or action are far too wide reaching, complicated and extensive for the human mind to keep track of, and even if we were able to follow the chain clearly, it is unlikely that just because one's intentions were good, that it necessarily follows that the outcome of those intentions are positive for all that end up being effected by it. 
+
+Somewhere in the middle of the talk I realized that, while it may have betrayed my westernness in thinking so, I believe in randomness and ambiguity and patterns so complex as to be indecipherable and to try and find the order and meaning within them is to miss the point of their existence. There is actually a word for this idea, pareidolia, which means simply the fanciful perception of meaning in something that is actually ambiguous, and this is perhaps what troubled me about the monks ideas, not that they were wrong, but that they strove to remove all ambiguity from life. I thought again of the moth fluttering on the concrete; the pattern of his dying arcs could hold some meaning if I chose to attach one to the other, but at the same time, perhaps the deeper meaning lay with my own awareness that I was creating it. That is to say, perhaps the moth was simply dying and any connection beyond that was an act of my imagination, not something inherent in the moth's death, which isn't to say that that connection shouldn't be made, but merely to acknowledge that the connection arose from the imagination. 
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/umongfishpond.jpg" width="165" height="220" class="postpicright" alt="Umong fishpond, Chiang Mai, Thailand" />Eventually as new people arrived questions and answers began to repeat themselves and as discreetly as possible I slipped away and wandered down to the shores of the pond to watch the cumulous clouds forming over the distant hills. I sat for a while on a small bench near the shore thinking of the clouds and the patterns and shapes we sometimes see in them, which like the moth's circle are inventions of our mind at play. As I stood to walk home it occurred to me that perhaps that the joy of life is not to puzzle out the connections between things, but to play amongst them and with them.
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