This too shall pass

I'll start this blog in a very similar fashion as my previous two. In my opinion a great comedian doesn't just make you laugh but also makes you think. A lot of people can make us laugh, all of us in our adult life have fallen victim to laughing at a fart joke, but how many people have we listened to that have genuinely made us laugh and contemplate life at the same time. "It's all bullshit and it's bad for you," it’s amazing how those few simple words can pertain to and make us rethink so many things.

This Picture is not from my travels in Asia although there is an Asian person in it. I took this picture a couple of weeks after returning home from Thailand. A friend had wanted a second tattoo and asked me to come along so I did. The words she chose to get etched into her forearm were "this to shall pass," a famous quote from the bible involving King Solomon. I won’t go into her personal reasons for getting the tattoo but historically the saying was meant to remind those who are down on their luck that things will turn around soon and get better, but was also meant to keep those too confident and comfortable humble, to remind them things will not be this way forever. With the presidency about to change, I thought this was a fitting quote and therefore a fitting picture to use to center my ideas around.

When George Bush "won" the presidency in the 2000 election anyone with half a brain knew we were in for some sort of national downturn. In exactly what way and how bad I don't think anyone was really sure, but you don't necessarily believe things are going to get better after a president-elect steals the election. So 7 years and a whole lot of ignorance later everyone was reminding themselves, "this too shall pass," after they watched him collapse both our biggest building and the worlds biggest economy down into the ground. Then along came a campaign, a campaign that was run by the word change, and millions of people looked down on the etchings on their forearms and jumped onto the change bandwagon.

Fast-forward to election night 2008, a bigger party night this year then new years and Halloween combined. People wore Obama's face plastered across their chest and went out to their favorite bar or club to watch state after state turn blue on flat screen plasma televisions. People inebriated past the point of reason screamed in the streets "We won," and "change!" And as I took the whole thing in I couldn’t help but think, I feel as if we have all kind of missed the point here. Where had we as a people gone wrong, to allow our support of change into something else, a trend, a fad, something that was cool and hip, and something that we would blindly follow and believe in no matter what, because it had taken on these properties.

If we learned anything from the Bush presidency I hope we learned, "It's all bullshit and it's bad for you." Unfortunately we have been filling ourselves with it since we knew Obama was going to run away with the presidency. Obama is Jesus and will feed and clothe every homeless in America, "its all bullshit and its bad for you." Obama will find every person in America a job when he becomes president, "its all bullshit and its bad for you." Tomorrow when Obama becomes president America will stop shooting innocent Iraqi's, "Its all bullshit and its bad for you." Will things get better, definitely. Does Obama have a lot of good ideas and plans to make this a better country, I for one think so. Is Obama a miracle worker? NO!

The bad times will pass and so will the good ones, but things like this don't happen overnight. When Solomon looked at his ring with the inscription "this too shall pass," he was saddened not because he thought he would lose all his wealth and prosperity the next day but he came to understand that it couldn’t last forever. Things will get better, it's the way the universe works, but it will take time and nothing can make things perfect. In a perfect world we wouldn't have people looking to exploit this presidency by making a quick dollar off a tee shirt or a button, and election night wouldn’t have consisted of going out to get drunk and have a one night stand. So when you’re worried about being able to make your rent next month and someone comes along to reassure you by saying, "don't worry Obama will find you a job," just remember "its all bullshit and its bad for you."

Perceptions of a Sleeping Thai

For those of you who are new to my blog I'll give you the rundown. George Carlin, one of the greatest comedians of all time, once said in a stand up act he did right before he was put into the ground "Its all bullshit and its bad for you," so in memory of Carlin I've chosen to make this the central theme of my blog.

I took this picture at the main Northern bus Terminal in Bangkok at 3 in the morning. I was about to travel to Cambodia and was told over the phone by information that the bus station had an 8PM bus departing for there. Unfortunately she was feeding me bullshit so when I arrived at the station I was left with no other option but to sleep there until 4 o’clock the next morning at which time the next bus to Cambodia would leave.

I think this is personally MY favorite picture from Thailand. There is something about the sleeping mans face that just looks so tired to me, it’s a look that can't be achieved from simply a lack of sleep. The bus stations in Thailand are interesting places. For the most part not many people speak English so a little Thai goes a long way when you need to find something out. After the general confusion and chaos that is involved upon entering the bus station I proceeded to grab the most comfortable seat since my ass would be occupying it for the next 9 hours. While I was waiting I began chatting with a Thai woman who was on her way to her hometown for a vacation. She asked me to watch her bags while she went to the bathroom and when she got back she went on to talk about how she had trusted me because I was a foreigner.

I was an American! The country that bred such good and honest men as Bernie Madoff, and Kenneth Lay. Such respectable, intelligent, good hearted people would never even ponder the thought of stealing even a piece of lint out of someone’s pants pockets. I found her initial perception of me to be a little too generous and those of her fellow Thai people a little to negative. Throughout my encounters through Thailand, as a whole I can honestly say I have never met a nicer, friendlier, generous people then Thai's. When it was time for her to take her leave we said our goodbyes and I went on to ponder her perception of me and people’s perceptions in general. For the rest of my time stranded in that bus station I brooded over how subjective we think our perceptions are and how un-subjective they genuinely tend to be.

Go into a bar, any bar, classy, trashy, artsy, I don’t care where you go just go somewhere, and ask the first person you see what language Thai people speak and see what answers you get. For all the knowledge and intelligence we preach we're all really full of bullshit, we don't know dick. Outside of our own little box of experience we don't know anything and yet we still have perceptions of the unknown. We have perceptions of how our government works, we have perceptions of what heaven will look like, and these perceptions are nothing more than images we've painted in our minds from information we've been told by various persons and medias. Whenever I tell someone that I lived in Thailand for a year I can see the brush in their mind go to work as it paints a picture of prostitutes and poverty. A dark, dank dangerous place where if you turn your back from a second you're likely to be robbed and raped, but travel to Thailand and if you’re welcomed by anything but smiling faces and generosity I will buy you a beer. I find it simply amazing how we have allowed people to complete the construction of our knowledge with sparse or false factual information and from that created an un-sturdy house of perceptions based around a television set of experiences. This is a worldwide phenomenon, no one is spared, myself included. In south East Asia westerners are idolized. Their perception of us is not of a people who blow up civilians for oil, or steal billions from their own country, and that’s simply because their perception is an un-subjective one.
Weeks after I finally trekked my way through Cambodia I met a Thai girl who had been robbed by a Canadian guy. Her "boyfriend" stole 200 American dollars from her, and her diary to boot. Had the woman at the bus station encountered the Canadian man instead of myself she most probably would have been traveling a lot lighter to her destination. We can't make perceptions about people, places, or things we don't know because what we are fed about these things is often nothing but a steaming pile of bullshit. We have to learn to rely solely on our own experience when it comes to making judgments about these things, so next time you find the brush stroke against the canvas of your mind, painting a picture of the unknown just remember "It's all bullshit and its bad for you."

Taofucianhauism?????

All, or most of, the pictures that I will be posting on this blog will be from my trip to Asia. I had grandiose plans of starting a picture blog while I was there but dumbing down my English all day every day definitely made it difficult to write intelligently and stunted my creativity. I think it's been good for me to remove myself from the pictures for a while anyway. It's given me a chance to examine exactly what it is I saw and look at them from a more subjective eye. I think if I had written this while I was in the midst of my travels I would have missed the point behind a lot of them.

First of all, I don't remember who said it, but someone once said, "we should cherish our comedians, they contribute more to our society then we realize." Tonight I watched the last stand up HBO comedy special George Carlin did before he passed away. He spoke on religion, politics, and family amongst other things and constantly repeated the line "It's all bullshit, and it's bad for you." In homage to Carlin and because I feel that that statement is one of the most universally true statements I've ever heard that will thread through many of my own posts I’ve decided to name my blog "Bullshit is bad for you."

I took this picture in a famous temple in Hoi An, Vietnam. I chose it as a topic centerpiece for my first post because it was always a good friend's favorite and because of that I always wanted to use it for something. I didn't ask the monk to pose for this picture he was actually performing temple duties at the time.
Vietnam is an interesting country with an interesting religion, a religion I personally admire for numerous reasons. Since I'm never amazed by the ignorance of people here (if one more person asks if they speak Taiwanese in Thailand I really think I'm going to have to blatantly call them out as mildly retarded) I'll explain a little about the religion the majority of Vietnamese people claim to identify with. If you were to go out on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh city and survey people most would probably claim to be Buddhist, BUT only because it would be too confusing and complicated to explain what they really are, which is essentially a hodgepodge of three different religions or philosophies. Due to the overwhelming influence from China and other countries years ago Vietnam has sculpted it's own religion from the clays of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. While they still call it Buddhism, and there still are a lot of similarities, there are still many obvious differences that I'll choose not to delve into.

I'm not "that guy" that thinks believing in God, Buddha, nirvana, heaven or whatever it is you want to believe in, is a bad thing. They’re all great stories that help a lot of people get through rough times in their life but ultimately they’re stories, the star wars of the BC generation. If these stories had been written in contemporary time and been placed in the non-fiction section of your favorite Barnes and Nobles, the author would be bitched out on Oprah within two days of the book hitting the shelves. The problem with religion for me is it takes away the ability for people to think for themselves and determine for themselves what good and bad is. Instead they are told the difference between "good" and "bad." They are TOLD what is acceptable and what is not, and millions of people around the world blindly follow it. What I loved about the Vietnamese people, and what I have tried to do in my own life, is they took pieces from different religions, ideals that THEY thought were good, and made set their OWN sets of morals based upon them. Now I'm not here to endorse or censure the beliefs of the Vietnamese people, I just think it's a feat to be commended that they didn't buy into the bullshit. I'll be the first to say those books, the Bible, Koran, Preaching’s of the Buddha, they all have some really great, meaningful, fulfilling ways to live your life by, but they’re also a how to guide book for anyone with half a brain to obtain power over someone else. What I think we have to do, and what the Vietnamese people as a collective have done, is learn from these things without following them blindly. If we are blind there isn’t even the possibility of us seeing the bullshit. Ultimately I think we just have to remember "its all bullshit and its bad for you," because if we remember that we will never go blind.