Bangkok Chinatown, Shibby with Wan Yi

Shibby, with Wanyi in background, on Thanon Yarowat, Bangkok,  just near the Red Shirt Seafood Restaurant spilling onto the street. Fantastic and inexpensive seafood from the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea.

Shibby in a Bangkok Tuk-Tuk, Cross Town to Yarowat 2009

Jordan & Jiao-Jiao on the Myanmar Bicycle, Pak Kret, Thailand 2009

Love At Minus 25 degreesC, A Sunny Day in Shen Yang, Peoples Republic of China, Christmas 2009

Brothers Fitzpatrick

Lawrence William, James Edward, Robert Charles & John Arhur.
Four reasons that the world is a beautiful place

A Thought

"God is Immaterial". A wonderful place to pray is at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok CBD. It's beautiful and so full of human intensity and meaning. It's a shrine to Brahma but is also well known as the Buddha of the Four Directions and it is a deeply spiritual place; and, importantly, for the hugely-rising number of Chinese visitors, who are fundamentally atheistic, it is a Lucky Place. I love to kneel there on the old concrete (all the street-concrete in Bangkok is always cracking because the city is sinking into the marsh beneath it. Sometimes in the wide concrete expanses, you can see the slow waves of the underlying formal tides) with the business men and the office girls and the general fluid mass of people that is Bangkok. This remarkable Krung Thep Mahanakorn. This is an amazing human city, fully dedicated to the real abiding deity of itself. All my life I will only pray in this place. I love the noise of the traffic, the smell of carbon and incense, the music of human movement, the boring chants, the beautiful flowers, the burning eyes, the raspy throat, the dance, the orange candle flames, and the depth of this astounding place. It is just near the Louis Vuitton shop and some bright and shiny massage parlours, and not far from the weapons-dealers, as it well should be, to come to terms at all with real human meaning.

I recall being in a prayer-garden in Singapore and noting that of all the Buddhas there, it was the marble head of the Buddha of Prosperity that was worn down the most through the decades of ardent human touch in total supplication.

Deleting the Koran

Burning Korans, and Bibles, and a variety of books is nothing new. People and governments have been doing this kind of thing for a long, long time for a variety of reasons and will continue to not only burn them but also to find other ways to seek to symbolically excise thought and philosophy as they see fit as the world changes. Look what has happened to Shinto, a damn good and deep human philosophy in its time; but now deemed somewhat 'inappropriate' because one lousy war was lost.(Oh, how the ghost of it clings).

I guess I'm a bit surprised that the American pastor had a hard-copy of the Koran. I have one on my hard-drive along with many other religious works and can, whenever it suits me, simply delete it. It's something I don't really need to inform the world media about.

I've already deleted every word of the Dalai Lama because he, disproportional to his meaning, takes up far too much space and he's mostly a troublemaker anyway. I was inducted into the Kalachakra Tantric Legacy by Dali Lama but I still know that he's a divisive clown. You don't have to be much of a 'rocket surgeon' to know that.

As for all the great religious texts, I'd prefer stuff by real fiction writers rather than by apologist wannabe God-Kings, whether they be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Buddhist self-marketeers, seeking proprietary ownership of this real, radically changing, un-owned, and mortally meaningful World.