Who is the master who makes the grass green?

I spend the day in Bangalore coming from Hampi and going to Cochi. Bangalore sucks. I pretty much spent the whole day arguing with rickshaw drivers and going from this park to that park to the botanical gardens and to another park in attempts to waste as much time as possible. I’m only in Bangalore because in order to get to Kerala I need to catch a bus here. My train from Hospet (Hampi) arrived in Bangalore at six in the morning. I check my trekking bag at the cloakroom and go out into the city to explore until my bus at seven p.m.

Bangalore isn’t a bad place, just a lame place...Now Ahmedabad was a shitty place. But that’s why I enjoyed it. I came back after several hours in Ahmedabad and required a lung transfer from the chemical exhaust…delicious…

In the botanical gardens of Bangalore there was this small section with several plaster statues of the dwarves from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. A sad looking old Indian man was watering the statues with a garden hose. That pretty much sums up my experience in Bang-a-whore…moving on now…

Kerala…alright...Some kid asks me for my autograph and picture. 4.5 months in and I remain a celebrity. I scope out the blue Chinese fishing nets and catch of the day in Fort Cochi…Squid and fish in all different shapes and sizes …I consume, over the course of several meals: fish, shrimp, fish, and yet again—more fish—all fresh I might add, straight from the Arabian sea…I go to a Kathakali play performance—traditional Kerala “esoteric ritual theatre form” as my book puts it…It was interesting, its about the battles between the Hindu Gods and Demons. I enjoyed parts of it and I don’t feel like explaining more about it…youtube it if you want to see what its about…Its very odd at some parts but worth checking out if you like abstract expression...

Fort Cochi is alright, reminds me of the Caribbean or Key West…Colonial and European sort of...I do notice lots of Communist Sickles, however…buuuttt nothing too special so I book out early and head to Munnar, which is on the Eastern border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu where they grow the tea, coffee, and other famous Indian spices…supposed to be cool.

The best part about traveling is the second I want to leave—I can. I just bail and enter what seems like another dimension. You can always head out the next day. I love when my plans fall apart and I find myself spur of the moment hitting some random place up. Forget the routine and forget planning…I’m starting to see how this is an adventure and half of it is just going…letting go of control…Don’t try and dictate the experience, just let it unfold as it should…This bus is going where? Whatever, sounds good man so long as its not here…But its always here….You can never get there because it just becomes here…weird…Xeno’s paradox or something…

I also had this deep epiphany of, “man, I am utterly fucking alone…” I am on the other side of the planet right now completely by myself…” I liked that, it was just like layers falling off and no existing obligations to anyone…There are still human networks you need to maneuver and play along with but I mean, there isn’t any check on me…there’s just me man, that’s it…Like, I’m surrounded by people…But they’re all Indians and tourists…I don’t know any of these people and I don’t have to hold myself accountable to any of them. Its an interesting revelation on a few levels.

Traveling alone is good for this reason. Its like, you don’t have some constant re-affirmation of who you are coming in the form of external pressure. Its just whatever the hell you are at the moment…No one is upholding your past except for you and you even start to drop it after a while and then its like…whats left, man?

Exactly.

There is no consistent response to your character, no routine, no static structure, just some sort of shape shifting vibrational field that warps you along deeper into it all.

I have diarrhea again. I’ve had it for several days. The result? I shit on my pants when attempting to use an Asian toilet in a Bangalore restaurant… I then accidently shit all over my leg, foot, and bathroom floor several days later when I’m naked and about to take a shower in Cochi. Whoops. Fortunately I was in the right place at the right time…

You might be looking at me like, “Jesus Jerry, what the fuck is wrong with you? Keep this stuff (shit) to yourself…”

And I am looking at you as such, “dude, I’m in fucking India…Need I remind you this is the public defecation capital of the universe?” Point is human liquid has a higher social role here than it does in the states…Toss your conditioned cleanliness aside and step into the bitter reality of life. Everyone shits (yes, even you!) and what the fuck am I supposed to do, not be human?

I’m starting to notice I get really unnecessarily defensive in my blog posts when its largely uncalled for…But the majority of things I do on a daily basis are uncalled for so it all fits in…Anyway, come here and stay for over four months and tell me you don’t have some kind of a disgusting shit story which you don’t personally find funny. If so, you didn’t leave the hotel room…Actually, chances are the 5 star hotel food was what caused the sickness…you can’t escape it…

Anyway…”…false emotions tell you fronted…”

So I hop on a state bus early morning to Munnar and take some diarrhea medication so I don’t shit my pants on the five hour bus ride…Our driver, due to following the cultural norm of Indian automobile aggression, causes a small accident where one dude took off another dude’s side mirror when attempting to bail out of the way from our speeding hunk of trash painted steel…The two sedans involved in the accident pull in front of our bus and of course, social uproar occurs…The whole neighborhood joins in on this it seems…I’m trying to figure out what the hell happened and I’m just like…meh…not like I really need to get anywhere so who cares? Enjoy the spectacle of someone elses society into oblivion…outside looking in..

Some guy comes onto our bus after twenty minutes of yelling and bullshit and orders us onto another state bus that has pulled up…damn dude…I had a sick seat (front row and single so no one could sit with me…) the nature of life is impermanence says the Buddha…I let it slide…I later have to transfer buses again at some station in the middle of nowhere Kerala…Its me and what looks to be a group of villagers

The pill I took for my diarrhea is prescription and an opiate derivative. It kicks in after a while and I realize I’m riding a bus through South Indian jungle while stoned on diarrhea medicine…feelsgoodman…but also, feelsweirdman…life continues on and my ipod mixes in well with all this…

My diarrhea buzz goes away rather fast, sadly…However, the drive through the Keralan jungle mountains into Munnar seems beyond description. I wrote 535 words describing the experience and the personal emotions that trailed but I’m taking a hint from myself, holding it back, and leaving it up to you to visit India (or wherever you need to go, doesn’t have to be India) to see what its all about. I’ll allow your own imagination to take over from here.

Well, hold on…I’ll say one thing on it...It’s odd. I find myself writing out these large blog posts and then deleting a significant portion of them before I post. If you haven’t noticed, I talk to myself a lot through my writing and my guess is that’s the cause…self-doubt is a dream killer and that right there, has truly been the cattle prod rammed into my neck for quite sometime… like a plastic bag sealed with duct tape over your head while serrated edges of the piano wire dig into your esophagus—this will only hurt a bit, its all for the better—what do you have, ten, twenty seconds left tops? Hope it’s a good trip to the other side man, I’m already there waiting for you, growing impatient each day as the wrathful social vendetta surfaces to untold proportions waiting to burn Babylon to the ground…what the hell am I talking about, never mind all that…Time to let go off that nonsense…During the bus ride into Munnar it was like, despite everything and all that has occurred—I’ve made it. I’ve done it. I’ve arrived. You unconsciously always knew you would but up until this point it didn’t look like it was going to happen. And so—getting there—that was special…really special. I’m happy to be here and the place is stunningly beautiful. Reminds me a lot of Northern California, quiet and very peaceful.

Not done yet. But checkpoint reached.

…I wonder what trekking through the Himalayas will be like…I like to get ahead of myself, which is more or less—the entire problem.

I check in to my hotel room and head out on foot to climb a tea field mountain. I go off the road to take a picture and I step (with both feet, still not sure how that happened…) in the gnarliest of puddles, six inches deep of putrid, stagnant, fluid and trash…I keep a sense of humor over these things but it throws off my steps because the slime makes my shoes slide like roller skates…

I walk further down the winding mountain road…Its quiet and even the psychotic Indian driving can’t throw the stillness of this place off…I think Vishnu lives in the tea fields here or something…It’s a powerful place and it overwhelms you from the second you see the hills and bottom lined palm trees…surreal at times and just, yeah…

I see a cow. I want to take a close up picture of its face and as I’m standing in its path I intuitively sense some kind of animosity between us…I notice the cow (with large horns I might add) start to walk towards me in hostile manner and I step out of the way only to have the fucker aggressively gore me with the brunt of its head up against the side of my hip, jolting me into the air a few inches… I missed the horns but it still hurt a lot…I furiously cursed it off as it continued walking and then I quickly realized I was yelling at a cow and started laughing…The impulse to whip out my knife and turn it into a delicious and deserving cheeseburger subsided after a moment or two…but still..what the fuck, cow…I thought you were supposed to be holy? I’m trying to detach myself from the drama of life but it seems the stupidest of things sucks me back in…so it goes…

I continue walking down the street and almost get run over twelve to fifteen times by jeeps, buses, and motorcycles…a couple times it was really too close…I decide to walk more off to the roadside tea fields…I have my camera out and the attached string gets hooked onto a barbwire fence, ripping the camera out of my hands, chucking it down the hill under the cover of the tea bushes…shit…I duck under the barb wire, remove my backpack and begin sifting through the tea bushes…Now, these things are thick, stiff, tightly packed, and way too small for me to maneuver through standing…So I have to crawl on my hands and knees through a tea field several yards down a dirt hill. I retrieve my camera (take a couple good pictures of me in a tea field so that was a plus) and emerge from the bushes near some Indian family taking photos, no doubt confusing the hell out of them as to where I came from…I get up with some crazy look in my eyes and a deranged smile. I head nod to them and walk away covered in dirt and filth. Victory.

At least fifteen different cars full of Indian people yelled something at me as they drove past...I suppose this is karma for yelling at all those people on the corner in Charlottesville…

I climb up this hill to the viewpoint and mountain mist masks the entire lookout. Instead, I watch Indian people decimate the area by littering…I don’t understand how people can just turn somewhere like Munnar into a trash pile…Its actually kind of sickening…But I don’t live here so its like….?.....You ever hear of this thing called the Gaian Theory, I don’t know much about it honestly but I think its something along the lines of the planet as one giant living organism with nothing excluded and human beings seem to be operating like a cancer…in the end I think its all for the greater good but right now I look around and shake my head…

I ask these five Indian dudes in a sedan for a ride back, not wanting to climb down...They enthusiastically agree and I hop in. We start talking and bond quickly…One dude even pulls out a large handle of brandy and pours me a glass…I see most of the bottle is gone and realize these dudes are pretty much all wasted…I don’t think the driver is but he didn’t speak any English and didn’t say anything so I don’t really know…We all get along really well to no surprise and exchange numbers…My guess is these dudes are like 35ish? But they live in Cochi and told me to hit them up when I come back around their way… I shake all their hands goodbye as they drop me off at my hotel and one dude kisses my hand to add to the shake…They didn’t speak English that well but that made it twice as hilarious. We would say like a paragraphs worth of shit to one another and realize the other didn’t get it, laughs all around…crazy fuckers…

I eat chicken, rice, and south Indian chapatti while watching a cosmic pink sunset pierce through the mist over the lush green mountains of teafields…Welcome home…I realize while eating how much I love India and Indian people. I realize on a deeper level why people are drawn here and some, such as my professor, never leave…

I need to wash that slime off my feet and brush my teeth.

A/C and non-A/C rooms available…100% pure veg…

Suppose a boat is crossing a river and another boat, an empty one, is about to collide with it. Even an irritable man would not lose his temper. But suppose there was someone in the second boat. Then the occupant of the first would shout to him to keep clear. And if he did not hear the first time, nor even when called to three times, bad language would inevitably follow. In the first case there was no anger, in the second there was - because in the first case the boat was empty, in the second it was occupied. And so it is with man. If he could only pass empty through life, who would be able to injure him? --- Chuang Tzu