confusion
Koi fish at the Suntec city koi pond. The red is reflections from the Chinese New Year’s decorations. I like the way the photo came out, though it was not my intended result, it looks like a painting to me.
Why? Why? Why can’t men in Singapore piss in the urinal? Why? I’ve been in Singapore for more than six years now and in every office I’ve worked in and many, many, many public buildings it seems to be impossible to use the urinal without stepping in Piss. Despite the fact that the cleaning staff usually cleans the restroom more than once a day it is inevitable that the floor in front of the urinal will look like some drunk decided to piss on the wall. Why? And aren’t talking about some pub where everyone taking a piss is pissed and therefore can’t aim. I work in buildings filled with professionals. What the fuck is wrong with these people? I would have to try to miss the urinal when I pissed to make this much mess of the floor. What the fuck?
Walking in the forest, I found a shovel sitting by a tree. So I dug a hole. A little way down I found a bone. Maybe a leg bone. Maybe human. I took the bone to the old woman who lives up the street. She deals tarot cards, reads palms and talks to the dead. The old woman told me it was indeed a human bone. She told me it had a violent past. Then she lit candles, burned incense, spoke in tongues, and communicated with the dead. Sitting in her living room surrounded by B-movie props I felt the air turn cold. A voice from the other side spoke; “leave me alone. My time has passed.” The old woman held out the bone for me and said, “bury it back where you found it.” So I returned to the forest, to the hole I had dug and I tossed in the bone. I picked up the shovel and filled in the hole. Then I took the shovel back with me and put it in the shed. Some stories were not meant to be told.
It is important to realize that the most effective forms of propaganda do not falsify verifiable truths and circumstances; instead they weave a preconceived pattern of significance through cleverly judicious use of available objective facts.
Dr Curtis Saxton, in Endor Holocaust [theforce.net]
That photo may be the last time I ever see a sunset from my grandparents farm. They are not getting any younger and given the cost and time to make the trip to rural Minnesota from halfway around the world I don’t know when I will get the time and change to do it again. I’d like to do it again. My daughter — the driver behind this trip — really enjoyed the farm and the whole trip. And it would be nice for her to spend more time with her great-grandparents. Especially since she is the first great-grandchild.
When I was growing up I spent a few weeks every other year on my grandparents farm. A lot of things have changed, or at least my perception of a lot of things has changed since I stopped going on family vacation when I was a teenager.
The most obvious change is that my grandfather does not farm any more. He rents the land out. So gone are the cows and tractors that dominated the daily routine when I was a kid. Other changes that I see; a lot less crop diversity than I used to see. Everything was corn and soybean. There were not even that many cows, just a sea of corn and soybean. Interestingly my uncle, who still makes a living farming, says that most of their soybean crop is shipped to Taiwan and Singapore. It’s a small world when you consider that the soybean that turned into my stinky tofu in Singapore might have been planted and harvested by my uncle halfway around the world.
The other thing that you can’t help but notice is that windmills. Everywhere. I do remember there being one, or two power generating windmills off somewhere to the east the last few times I visited the farm as a kid. Now they are everywhere. And trucks carrying 100 foot blades are all over the roads. Seeing all the windmills gives me a bit more hope that despite the blowhards in Washington and their inability to move beyond the “did we cause it” to the “how to stop it” discussions on global warming (or climate change) that the world is moving on without them. The exploitation of renewable energy sources is proceeding apace in the commercial world; let the politicians blow on.
You can see the whole Pipestone, MN, USA, September 2010 photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].