Josiah Ramsay Johnston

The light filters through the shorn branches of trees half-reaching like arthritic fingers towards a horizon increasingly studded with the newly contructed homes of the affluent, the spears of light falling across the sidewalk, dappling the cement into a constant dance of innumerable silent forms moving to a rhythm contained in the wind. The murmurs of independent actions rumble across the valley which holds the city i live in, perpetrated by people i will never know or understand. Lives are lived. Gas meters fall. Leaves collect in the kinds of places things long dead collect. The virtuosity of a silent scene and a leaf leave me speechless.

Well, this semester is wrapping itself up nicely, im looking into starting a rotary club in Hangzhou, if its possible, affiliated with Zhenjijang Uni. and the Friend’s World Center there, with the hopes of fostering a bit of intercommunity involvement and increasing the amount of interaction between the Chinese community and the foreign students…though i dont have any clue what it will be like yet….
Looking at Fulbright fellowship options for my proposal, thinking about ways of researching the preservation of cultural identity in endangered regions such as Tibet and Central Asia.
The boat is coming along, the portfolio is almost complete, rents payed, presents arent wrapped, China’s planned, the proposal for the local newspaper has been sent in, and im waiting on my student visa app. from china to begin to feel comfortable in my arrangement of arrangements.
Blogging offers the one true creative impulse free reign: narcissism.

The american life is an interesting one, despite the superfluity, the over-abundant metaphor and culturaly symbol misused as it is in our rampant hybridization binge we call globlization…’We were so excited we could do it, we never stopped to think if we should.’
There are tons of automobiles, atumatically mobile human beings driving to planes to be taken to the Kushite pyramids of Nubia only to return and buy Christmas cards that do not relate anything of the personal experience of the individual to those they want so badly to understand them…
The lack of understanding, bred as it is on half and half alternative puritanical isolationism and the intentional limitation of our dreaming ability, mixed in with the cold black coffee of the real world outside our media-filtered personal representations of the real world.
Cold and black and coffee is all good with me, as alkaloids are one of my favorite past pastimes, balance is essential and cold is always better when its hot outside; its the need to mix something i am not sure belongs to me which makes it slightly difficult to drink the beverage of american life after having been to enough other places to realize we are most definitely the exception in our gluttonous way of life, rather than the rule.