The description of your neighbour, Dzuy, was illuminating.
For the first time I realized that the entire time they were slowly taking down the USA, they were simultaneously projecting a fantasy-image of a non-existent "Promised Land" to the rest of the world.
What was that expression about a sucker being born every minute? Terrible thing is that this nasty circus they've been setting up for all of us is about to get very real.
I miss the alleys of Eastern Asia. Even though more jammed together than the rest of the city, they provide a sense of a vibrant small town in the midst of even massive cities. The alleys in my current US town are barren and are not a place I would want to be after dark.
Regarding Dzuy, Huxley made a great observation. No one wants an ugly fact to get in the way of a beautiful idea.
So, Dzuy is really no different than most people. Expats tend to create a virtual country that may have little to do with the actual foreign country in which they live. Talk, for example, with gringos in Mexico and they are living in paradise. Anyone who disagrees is a racist and should leave. Talk to Mexicans and you get a very different picture.
Dzuy reminds me of people who lived outside of San Francisco in their view of San Francisco for men. Men in other parts of the country felt San Francisco had only homosexual men and women were desperate to even get a glimpse of a heterosexual male. Sort of like they would stand by the freeway just to watch them drive by.
I found that when I would explain that among the hetero pop men outnumbered women in part because of the image of all homosexual men, they would just laugh. Even though I lived in San Francisco I obviously was a loon who didn't know what he was taking about. The beautiful idea of a paradise for heterosexual men where women are desperate to meet them was more powerful than any ugly fact.
Before I read a word, I almost went to the comments and asked, "Is that a monk smoking a cigarette?"
Reminds me of a faux energy drink that I fantasized about once whose can would have a Buddhist monk riding a motorcycle with Jenna Jameson on the back as it's logo. Maybe this is the guy.
Can someone explain why Linh never shows up in my feed anymore when he is one of two of my paid subscriptions? Does it look like SubStack is blacklisting Linh to anyone else?
I had it happen to me again and I had to find it all over again. It took hours ugh! I did find it. The toggle switch is found in the edit profile tab in looking at profile
Your photos of the human stream deserve a book of their own - Asian Alleys. First there's the smartly clad back street goddess, tall and elegant w/ meat cleaver in hand. Then there's that other diminutive worker w/ the scrawny triangular titties plus the young hottie squirting mustard w/ casual duck mouth concentration. For contrast that dismaying sequence of the pitiful whore from Camden deserving of an ironic title like "Meanwhile Back in America."
Not that it should all be working women. There are the colorful male customers too. That rendition of a Cambodian speaking the pidgen English was a riot. And the pose of that jolly monk in the crimson robe made me think of James Baldwin. Is his dark skin color at all typical of Southeast Asians? He seems like a guest-starring anomaly.
Colours. People's perception of colours. Linh, I'm a rabbit with a lot of interest in colours. Specifically how they're perceived by humans. As a former professional pyrotechnic chemist and professional fireworks display company owner, I could chatter longly about them and how people's understanding of them is far from universal. Not least the number of them colour blind, but there's also a lot of variation between so-called normal vision and the weirdest of colour blindness. Which in it's infinite grey scale is perhaps the most technically accurate vision of all. I personally worry a lot about the likely loss of sharpness which would have been the norm in my younger years. Is that a hangover from B & W TV years? I thought colour TV was weird, and didn't seem to have the definition that B & W did. My 99.9% Aspie memory is also in B & W until I focus on a scene too.
If we get plugged in via the billionaires plans, I wonder how long before the option to adjust the colours of one's reality would appear?
Smoking is certainly a vice and I am not advocating it...however...it is a human activity. It may be dirty and disgusting and all that, but only humans do it (except for that famous photo of the smoking chimpanzee). I have a thesis that there is a link between the decline of Western civ and the forced eradication of being allowed to smoke cigarettes in Western countries.
Hello Linh , I told my husband that you quit drinking & he said , “can he still write “ , he was being funny , his brother was the late great Joe Sobran , you certainly had somethings in common in ref to Jew empire ……..
When you say "...I can't turn my mind off..." you reminded me of this; I became interested in personality typing about 15 or 16 years ago because I couldn't understand why I had so much difficulty "fitting in" to the society I was born in to, the United States.
Studying some of the personality typing books I discovered I was an Introvert Intuitive in a society primarily made up of Extroverted Sensors. (Introverted Intuitives look for abstract, often hidden, patterns in the world while Extroverted Sensors see the world in a practical manner as forthright empirical facts and plain data.)
Some, what I consider to be rather rigid, dogmatic thinkers believe that personality typing is a pseudo- science with little to no value. However it really helped me understand why I had so much difficulty fitting in to American society that values the practical, down-to-earth stolid types and implicitly if not always explicitly is put off by the deeper thinkers who ask too many questions and too often challenge the status quo.
The problem with being an Introvert Intuitive is they make up a small segment of the population, perhaps five or six percent of people are Introverted Iintuitives and they often retreat to colleges or universities where they can escape to their libraries or quiet offices and immerse themselves in ideas. On the other side of the equation Extroverted Sensors make up around 60% of the population. In the middle of this demographic are Extroverted Intuitves and Introverted Sensors. (The Extroverted Intuitives may be the most outwardly successful types; they can see the "big picture" but at the same time can relate to people in the customary glib and superficial manner. The Introverted Sensors are the quiet types who don't make waves, don't ask too many questions and often just go along with whatever the status quo of a society may be. These later types often become the craftsman, waitresses and assembly line workers who quietly and uncomplainingly do whatever society tells them to do.)
There is some evidence that Western societies push borderline introvert-extroverts to become extroverts while Eastern societies are more accepting of introverts.
Anyway your statement about not being able to turn one's mind off reminded me of this. One might be grateful that one has a mind to turn off. I'm pretty convinced that many people don't. Perhaps these are the folks who are so enamored by the hideous invention, cell phones? Someone might undertake some research on that some day?
PS I can get a fair cup of freshly brewed coffee at a little market just down the street here in Bridgeport for a mere one dollar. (I saw more Starbucks and pretentious coffee shops in Dumaguete, Phillippines than what we have here in this blighted, abandoned section of Bridgeport. (Chris Hedges calls these American cities abandoned by the capitalists "Sacrifice Zones"; I call them the new "Fourth World"; enclaves in the First World that have been used up and abandoned by the economic system of capitalism.) The market is apparently owned by a Peruvian migrant who works unbelievably hard: his market is open seven days a week from six a.m. until about 10 p.m. And it is the only place I can get fresh produce around here. Without his market I'd have to take a fairly long and not cheap bus ride to a supermarket over in Fairfield. Which reminds me, why the hell is public transport so expensive?! Shouldn't it be subsidized to encourage its use? I guess not. We all need to go out and buy a private car and a constant supply of gasoline to keep Exxon-Mobil rolling in dough. And, while I'm on the topic, electric cars (EVs for those who have trouble with multi-syllable words) aren't much better. The pollution they create is just more hidden away from view. It is overseas in the lithium mining operations needed to make EV batteries as well as the sources of the electricity for the EVs. Are Americans so naive that they think windmills and solar panels are being used to make the electricity that fuels their trendy EVs? It's mostly the usual old culprit, petroleum that's just not put directly into their vehicle but used to make the electricity. As is often the case for Americans "out of sight, out of mind" and "not in my backyard." Was there ever such a dullard bunch of people on the face of the earth? How about some efficient, modern public transport like the passenger train system in China. But that's asking for some practical improvement for the people. When what the U.S. is really about is shifting money into the hands of the oligarchs and plutocrats who, as George Carlin said, "own" the country. "You have owners, they own you..." But enough already.
In the book The Cure for All Diseases by Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D., N.D., she says
"Another sleep disturbance is walking in the night and not being able to go back to sleep for hours. Or not being able to get to sleep.
"I believe these problems are caused by a high ammonia level in the brain. Ornithine, an ammonia reducer, ..... It is also observed that after killing parasites, which produce ammonia, sleep is much improved. .... The brain was never meant to be parasitized or infected and has no defense. ...... Tryptophane, another amino acid, is about twice as powerful as ornithine ..."
I have been taking ornithine. It helps some but is not 100% effective. Also tryptophane is not 100% effective. Parasites are probably my problem. I have started a new herbal program to try to remedy the problem.
You described a sleep issue that I've struggled with for years, acutely here since a tick borne babesiosis infection that was diagnosed in 2020. I've been a lifelong insomniac, tried drinking and drugging myself for a long time. Obviously this had diminishing returns. I was on heavy anti psychotics when the doctors thought that the babesiosis symptoms were psychiatric in nature. It was horrible and I still couldn't sleep or do much of anything but stay in bed and try to read. Amazingly, after a year plus of antibiotics and anti malarials, I can walk again and am starting to sleep again, three and four hour stretches. No more medications, but I diligently follow an "integrative" course of supplementation which still includes a variety of herbal antiparasitic and detox components.
I'd never heard of the ornithine, ammonia, early waking hypothesis before. I'm doing my best to reset my sleep and any information helps. Thank you.
Interesting that the antibiotics and anti malarials have helped you to sleep. Yes, sleep issue/insomnia is a struggle - torture.
Perhaps you would be able to find a product that eliminates ammonia from the brain. I am always on the lookout for finding one. Good luck with your future discoveries.
The description of your neighbour, Dzuy, was illuminating.
For the first time I realized that the entire time they were slowly taking down the USA, they were simultaneously projecting a fantasy-image of a non-existent "Promised Land" to the rest of the world.
What was that expression about a sucker being born every minute? Terrible thing is that this nasty circus they've been setting up for all of us is about to get very real.
I miss the alleys of Eastern Asia. Even though more jammed together than the rest of the city, they provide a sense of a vibrant small town in the midst of even massive cities. The alleys in my current US town are barren and are not a place I would want to be after dark.
Regarding Dzuy, Huxley made a great observation. No one wants an ugly fact to get in the way of a beautiful idea.
So, Dzuy is really no different than most people. Expats tend to create a virtual country that may have little to do with the actual foreign country in which they live. Talk, for example, with gringos in Mexico and they are living in paradise. Anyone who disagrees is a racist and should leave. Talk to Mexicans and you get a very different picture.
Dzuy reminds me of people who lived outside of San Francisco in their view of San Francisco for men. Men in other parts of the country felt San Francisco had only homosexual men and women were desperate to even get a glimpse of a heterosexual male. Sort of like they would stand by the freeway just to watch them drive by.
I found that when I would explain that among the hetero pop men outnumbered women in part because of the image of all homosexual men, they would just laugh. Even though I lived in San Francisco I obviously was a loon who didn't know what he was taking about. The beautiful idea of a paradise for heterosexual men where women are desperate to meet them was more powerful than any ugly fact.
Before I read a word, I almost went to the comments and asked, "Is that a monk smoking a cigarette?"
Reminds me of a faux energy drink that I fantasized about once whose can would have a Buddhist monk riding a motorcycle with Jenna Jameson on the back as it's logo. Maybe this is the guy.
So cool, just let this life happen.
I just wanted to wave to the fellow with the cigarette. Good picture
Can someone explain why Linh never shows up in my feed anymore when he is one of two of my paid subscriptions? Does it look like SubStack is blacklisting Linh to anyone else?
I had it happen to me again and I had to find it all over again. It took hours ugh! I did find it. The toggle switch is found in the edit profile tab in looking at profile
The photo of the little girls made me smile. Alas, the photos of Amanda made me cry.
Ameen and ameen.
Your photos of the human stream deserve a book of their own - Asian Alleys. First there's the smartly clad back street goddess, tall and elegant w/ meat cleaver in hand. Then there's that other diminutive worker w/ the scrawny triangular titties plus the young hottie squirting mustard w/ casual duck mouth concentration. For contrast that dismaying sequence of the pitiful whore from Camden deserving of an ironic title like "Meanwhile Back in America."
Not that it should all be working women. There are the colorful male customers too. That rendition of a Cambodian speaking the pidgen English was a riot. And the pose of that jolly monk in the crimson robe made me think of James Baldwin. Is his dark skin color at all typical of Southeast Asians? He seems like a guest-starring anomaly.
Hi Billy,
The monk is darker than most Cambodians, but consider also the distortions of photography! I like my colors saturated.
Linh
Colours. People's perception of colours. Linh, I'm a rabbit with a lot of interest in colours. Specifically how they're perceived by humans. As a former professional pyrotechnic chemist and professional fireworks display company owner, I could chatter longly about them and how people's understanding of them is far from universal. Not least the number of them colour blind, but there's also a lot of variation between so-called normal vision and the weirdest of colour blindness. Which in it's infinite grey scale is perhaps the most technically accurate vision of all. I personally worry a lot about the likely loss of sharpness which would have been the norm in my younger years. Is that a hangover from B & W TV years? I thought colour TV was weird, and didn't seem to have the definition that B & W did. My 99.9% Aspie memory is also in B & W until I focus on a scene too.
If we get plugged in via the billionaires plans, I wonder how long before the option to adjust the colours of one's reality would appear?
Smoking is certainly a vice and I am not advocating it...however...it is a human activity. It may be dirty and disgusting and all that, but only humans do it (except for that famous photo of the smoking chimpanzee). I have a thesis that there is a link between the decline of Western civ and the forced eradication of being allowed to smoke cigarettes in Western countries.
great adventure to a place i will never see
You still stick? What's up?
Have you given up booze entirely now?
Hi Zep,
I haven't had a drink in more than three months. I'm fine as long as I watch what I eat.
Linh
P.S. Since I can't turn my mind off, I'm writing more! It's exhausting.
Hello Linh , I told my husband that you quit drinking & he said , “can he still write “ , he was being funny , his brother was the late great Joe Sobran , you certainly had somethings in common in ref to Jew empire ……..
When you say "...I can't turn my mind off..." you reminded me of this; I became interested in personality typing about 15 or 16 years ago because I couldn't understand why I had so much difficulty "fitting in" to the society I was born in to, the United States.
Studying some of the personality typing books I discovered I was an Introvert Intuitive in a society primarily made up of Extroverted Sensors. (Introverted Intuitives look for abstract, often hidden, patterns in the world while Extroverted Sensors see the world in a practical manner as forthright empirical facts and plain data.)
These are two good books that I found useful to help me understand the difficulty of being an Introverted Intuitive. American society is structured by default to accommodate Extroverted Sensors. Because they are the majority of any population at least in the West https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49322 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Understand_Me.
Some, what I consider to be rather rigid, dogmatic thinkers believe that personality typing is a pseudo- science with little to no value. However it really helped me understand why I had so much difficulty fitting in to American society that values the practical, down-to-earth stolid types and implicitly if not always explicitly is put off by the deeper thinkers who ask too many questions and too often challenge the status quo.
The problem with being an Introvert Intuitive is they make up a small segment of the population, perhaps five or six percent of people are Introverted Iintuitives and they often retreat to colleges or universities where they can escape to their libraries or quiet offices and immerse themselves in ideas. On the other side of the equation Extroverted Sensors make up around 60% of the population. In the middle of this demographic are Extroverted Intuitves and Introverted Sensors. (The Extroverted Intuitives may be the most outwardly successful types; they can see the "big picture" but at the same time can relate to people in the customary glib and superficial manner. The Introverted Sensors are the quiet types who don't make waves, don't ask too many questions and often just go along with whatever the status quo of a society may be. These later types often become the craftsman, waitresses and assembly line workers who quietly and uncomplainingly do whatever society tells them to do.)
There is some evidence that Western societies push borderline introvert-extroverts to become extroverts while Eastern societies are more accepting of introverts.
Anyway your statement about not being able to turn one's mind off reminded me of this. One might be grateful that one has a mind to turn off. I'm pretty convinced that many people don't. Perhaps these are the folks who are so enamored by the hideous invention, cell phones? Someone might undertake some research on that some day?
PS I can get a fair cup of freshly brewed coffee at a little market just down the street here in Bridgeport for a mere one dollar. (I saw more Starbucks and pretentious coffee shops in Dumaguete, Phillippines than what we have here in this blighted, abandoned section of Bridgeport. (Chris Hedges calls these American cities abandoned by the capitalists "Sacrifice Zones"; I call them the new "Fourth World"; enclaves in the First World that have been used up and abandoned by the economic system of capitalism.) The market is apparently owned by a Peruvian migrant who works unbelievably hard: his market is open seven days a week from six a.m. until about 10 p.m. And it is the only place I can get fresh produce around here. Without his market I'd have to take a fairly long and not cheap bus ride to a supermarket over in Fairfield. Which reminds me, why the hell is public transport so expensive?! Shouldn't it be subsidized to encourage its use? I guess not. We all need to go out and buy a private car and a constant supply of gasoline to keep Exxon-Mobil rolling in dough. And, while I'm on the topic, electric cars (EVs for those who have trouble with multi-syllable words) aren't much better. The pollution they create is just more hidden away from view. It is overseas in the lithium mining operations needed to make EV batteries as well as the sources of the electricity for the EVs. Are Americans so naive that they think windmills and solar panels are being used to make the electricity that fuels their trendy EVs? It's mostly the usual old culprit, petroleum that's just not put directly into their vehicle but used to make the electricity. As is often the case for Americans "out of sight, out of mind" and "not in my backyard." Was there ever such a dullard bunch of people on the face of the earth? How about some efficient, modern public transport like the passenger train system in China. But that's asking for some practical improvement for the people. When what the U.S. is really about is shifting money into the hands of the oligarchs and plutocrats who, as George Carlin said, "own" the country. "You have owners, they own you..." But enough already.
Sounds like another term for Asperger's. I've come down to the conclusion this is why I'm out of tune always.
In the book The Cure for All Diseases by Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D., N.D., she says
"Another sleep disturbance is walking in the night and not being able to go back to sleep for hours. Or not being able to get to sleep.
"I believe these problems are caused by a high ammonia level in the brain. Ornithine, an ammonia reducer, ..... It is also observed that after killing parasites, which produce ammonia, sleep is much improved. .... The brain was never meant to be parasitized or infected and has no defense. ...... Tryptophane, another amino acid, is about twice as powerful as ornithine ..."
I have been taking ornithine. It helps some but is not 100% effective. Also tryptophane is not 100% effective. Parasites are probably my problem. I have started a new herbal program to try to remedy the problem.
Hi Elaine,
You described a sleep issue that I've struggled with for years, acutely here since a tick borne babesiosis infection that was diagnosed in 2020. I've been a lifelong insomniac, tried drinking and drugging myself for a long time. Obviously this had diminishing returns. I was on heavy anti psychotics when the doctors thought that the babesiosis symptoms were psychiatric in nature. It was horrible and I still couldn't sleep or do much of anything but stay in bed and try to read. Amazingly, after a year plus of antibiotics and anti malarials, I can walk again and am starting to sleep again, three and four hour stretches. No more medications, but I diligently follow an "integrative" course of supplementation which still includes a variety of herbal antiparasitic and detox components.
I'd never heard of the ornithine, ammonia, early waking hypothesis before. I'm doing my best to reset my sleep and any information helps. Thank you.
Hi Troy,
Interesting that the antibiotics and anti malarials have helped you to sleep. Yes, sleep issue/insomnia is a struggle - torture.
Perhaps you would be able to find a product that eliminates ammonia from the brain. I am always on the lookout for finding one. Good luck with your future discoveries.
Keeping off the sauce is easier when you find better things to do with your time.
Your writing and photography fills the gap.
May you get stronger with each passing day.