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ENDURANCEWRITER

AKA Damon Arvid. Under-the-radar writer, musician. Let's keep it that way. The cloud novels and other highlights are being collected at DamonArvid.com. To access all the music and Avocado Sun, click the big black box below.

Fabric - Summon These Days (Music)

Unfair Denial

1/31/2017

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The words have been covered over. But they exist in memory.
I am getting the next section of Arisugawa Park ready for publication... I really am enjoying this process of getting the sections just right for my current mood and the state of the Union. There is no reason why the plot needs to stay rooted in a reality 10 years past. In fact, it is kind of cool having a finished manuscript kicking around that I can play with and make relevant to what is occurring in the world today. 

Cowachunga is taking form at the same time, Baja and life on the other side of the proposed wall is very instructive for that. Also have some musicians starting to congeal around the Fabric Dos fabric music album concept.
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Aliens and advanced systems.
In other news, a NY Times piece "Refugees Entering the U.S. Already Face a Rigorous Vetting Process" lays out the actual steps involved in coming to this country. I am going to leave out all the annotations and give the bare bones:

​1. Registration with the United Nations.
2. Interview with the United Nations.
3. Refugee status granted by the United Nations.
4. Referral for resettlement in the United States.
5. Interview with State Department contractors. 
6. First background check.
7. Higher-level background check for some.
8. Another background check.
9. First fingerprint screening; photo taken.
10. Second fingerprint screening.
11. Third fingerprint screening.
12. Case reviewed at United States immigration headquarters.
13. Some cases referred for additional review.
Syrian applicants must undergo two additional steps.
14. Extensive, in-person interview with Homeland Security officer.
Most of the interviews with Syrians have been done in Jordan and Turkey.
15. Homeland Security approval is required.
16. Screening for contagious diseases.
17. Cultural orientation class.
18. Matched with an American resettlement agency.
19. Multi-agency security check before leaving for the United States.
20. Final security check at an American airport.

So basically people with the skills and determination to go through this process are those who keep our country skilled and competitive. Denying them entrance is kind of like publishers denying the manuscript I worked on for 10 years publication on the grounds that it doesn't meet what the market wants... doh... happened.  

​#AriPark
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With roots in the mountains, can you not also fly?
I could go with some choice quips from the Fabric - Chasing Sun fb page where I lay out feedstuff in all its idiosyncratic glory, but why not check it yourself. (Someday I'll get around to compiling it all into a bathroom reader, but for now lets enjoy the discombobulated  anonymity that the internet and the feed allow).

That said, I must share this prediction, inspired in part by a Medium article by Jake Fuentes The Immigration Ban is a Headfake, and We’re Falling For It. I may be totally off, but when the aha! moment came to me it felt very plausible and that is usually a good sign to bet or fold. Let's double down on my hunch:

"Prediction: there will be some demonstration/protest flashpoint in the next three months in which injuries if not deaths occur, and that will be used by Trump/Bannon/Pence/Kushner (if they have consolidated power enough) to push through a state of emergency. 

Worst case scenario: radicals and plants are allowed to dominate the headlines, creating a sense of visceral fear. Those smart enough will ask who whipped up such as scenario... the rest will march restlessly toward the iron gates.

On the other hand, there may be ideological and moral rifts within the government and military that create a situation of stand-off... a power limiting force. If this is all peaceful and the lines are well demarcated, it is a positive development... in other words the power to enforce much of the alt-right's agenda will be cordoned off. 

The Republicans handcuffed Obama in this way, although his agenda was much less extreme. This time actual weaponry stockpiles and access to codes would likely be factored into the calculations, though again they would be "bluffing chips." Do not expect Russia to be absent from this dynamic, they are already involved.

I think this might just get us* through four years of what was known back in the day as a Mexican standoff. And then in 2-4 years, elections will allow a more informed (sobered?) populace to make rational decisions about the future of the country.... oh and of the world. 

* Those Americans who still believe in a balance between democratic traditions, freedom, and living together in harmony with the earth and ourselves. Used to be called patriotism, such a definition may still come to pass."

​#endwriter
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Separate My Soul (2 Year Blog Anniversary)

1/26/2017

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The creative process owes a big debt to my trusty 17-inch 2011 MacBook (modeled at Brecia in TJ). Model discontinued in 2014, fully refurbished by Apple in 2016, this is truly the Millennium Falcon of laptops. Valued more the worse the Internet signal becomes, counterintuitively.
I began this blog two years ago (+10 days) with no clear idea of where it would lead. Arisugawa Park manuscript nearing completion and this agent I had somehow picked up (for reasons unclear to me to this day) preparing to shop the novel.

Well, several strike outs and flirtations with poverty down the road, realizing that very few people are there for you when it counts––in ways that enable personal evolution, jobs outside parcel wrapping, fact checking––I am still kicking as a cloud novelist. We are up to Chapter 2 in Arisugawa Park the Cloud Novel and hallelujah for that.

My grammar is there, my imagination is intact, I have a day job
writing that basically covers the bills and allows me to travel in less expensive locales––there is no reason to reason to force my art in any direction it does not want to go.

The further I get from the tone-deaf bifurcations of American politics, the closer I feel I am to the source. I cannot be fairly accused of appropriation because (like the best) I am an equal opportunity thief. What I do does not (by definition?) make money––thanks  Bob Dylan,  Mark Twain, and too many others to count for setting up the muse as a fool's quest toward a horizon with no end. Thanks for the memories and the destinations to come. 

Currently in Baja, envisioning Fabric Dos, getting a couple musicians interested (harder here because people are  in cars, have more regimented jobs). Harder also because now is the time of maximum friction. 20 percent import tariff from the Trumpeter to build a border wall? Unilateralist bullshit.

Then again, this makes it all easier in a way... Fabric Dos almost writes itself. Something must be said, dreamt, sung, or written about here. The border is such an arbitrary concept––which the profit-focused elite take full advantage of to corrupt places, diminish fabric. 

At the time when my grandfather was growing up in South Dakota, he was surrounded by people who bore more resemblance to Northern Mexican Indios than Eastern European supermodels of our current first family. He communicated in his way, though given the intense pressures of Dust Bowl locust plagues, there was barely room for survival. That culture, whether in Mexico or the United States, is what still exists and what some huckster, joker, tacky real estate meister is trying to destroy. Hence the song title "Separate My Soul." 
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In honor of the second year anniversary of endurancewriter a photo from the first post.  Via Amtrak all night from Raleigh to Miami. Coffee on the house from a conductor-cum-philospher, my first concrete inkling that this reality-denial thing was percolating among the masses.

#endwriter
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Read " COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, 1:51AM"
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Quips - Hello From The Other Side

1/25/2017

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​I'm on the other side of the wall looking across Tijuana toward San Diego and.... well, fears are vastly overstated. But then we knew that, right?
The yin and yang of an emerging autocracy... rogue rangers apparently can't be stopped... while the elevation of alternative facts results in record sales of George Orwell's 1984. Stuff starts to hit the fan in South China Sea. When I interned at ITC in DC, it was shocking how few people focused on Asia and what little knowledge existed . May just come back to bite.​

As the Onion pointed out, poor Trump... trying to reap the benefits of office that are rightfully his and getting stymied by liberal do-gooders (goober farmers, no less) at every turn.

It's fake news/alternative fact, but triangulation discombobulation has occurred... mission accomplished.
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You can tell a lot about the current goals and aspirations from a random table shot.
Quotes it seems may have been said before: 

Democracy is only as strong as its weakest li​nk.

Growing up... you care so much about what people think until you realize no one really cares.
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totally give him Machiavellian credit then... oh wait, to the ghost writer of the book.
A prediction I don't want to make: Legacy of Trump's Presidency is likely ramped up hostilities, if not outright war with China. Probably leave it for the liberals to mop up, as with Bush and Obama. And yeah, it has been pointed out that it would be a great way of deflecting attention from poor performance. 

And what about the butcher's bill being due, as Chauncey DeVega puts it? Sad to say, I have this particular form of Schadenfreude myself... when I know in my heart that the gullible are not to blame for what they bring upon themselves.
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M.T. Anderson opines: "When falsehood invades the highest offices in the land, it forces the population into a surreal doubleness where there are two sets of memories, two account books, two realities that must be contended with. This chokes those who want to operate through a legal framework, according to the rules, since the rules now apply to a fantasy; a complicated strategic triangulation is always necessary to produce a real result. Opponents have to struggle continually with cognitive dissonance."
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Okay that's enough quip-like politics. If you like this type of stuff, follow the Fabric - Chasing Sun page on Fabric. Make it your go to source for unfake news. 
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To end on a lighter note, how about some alternative grammar?
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ENDWRITER Defined - An INTERVIEW With my 43-Year-Old self (In Lieu of New Year's Resolutions) Pt.1

1/18/2017

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A new year, wipe away your cares.
Frank Jaguaradi (for Separate Magazine): You had quite a year, as an... I don't know what to call you, writer, artist... 

Damon Shulenberger: Pardon my poor French, allez vous... (coughs into napkin and takes out another Licorrette). I like to think of myself of a liver of life as it could be lived by many, if we truly took advantage of digital capacities and got beyond this hangup of private property.

A common misconception is that I am against technology. True, I am not a cheerleader on a personal level...I got rid of my iPhone in 2016 (or should I say it liberated itself as part of the Malasimbo Revolution).

Try not to use technology much, but I'll be the first to admit it is working for me even when I am not online. It is definitely doing things to promote fabric concept without my being aware. Hard to keep track of 350,000 sleeper bots, which is what $1.5 million in cold hard cash buys you.

As I see it, technology is inherent in fabric and must be leveraged, if it is to change how monetary resources are allocated, in a way most people around the globe benefit from. Not the 8 families who control half of the world's wealth. The quandary is how to unleash this money without accelerating the pace of consumption, construction, fossil fuel use, environmental destruction. Even the most well-intentioned will go out and buy a car the first time they see real money. Imagine 4 billion people going out and doing this... Beijing on a mass scale. 

Jaguaradi: So fabric is a way of...

DS: Taking the algorithm back and using for purposes that promote sustainability, with the teeth of real transactional flow. Fabric is a map-based travel app that enables transactions, with the money distributed as best as possible to local regions in ways that get around the corrupt government phenomenon so prevalent... everywhere. 

Jaguaradi: 80 percent of profits returned to the "fabric," with a 20 year plan in place to make that 100 percent is certainly ambitious.... 


DS: The point as I see it is that there are numerous ways in which the Net can be misused and we are succumbing to those uses. The advertisement for the Mesothelioma Center that appeared in my Facebook feed an hour after I researched the topic on Google for a client is one small example. At the beginning of the day I had not even been aware that such a thing as mesothelioma existed and now... voila!

No doubt, mass data collocation in ways that drives real world decisions can have unfortunate consequences. Given that this is a nuclear era, safeguards must exist that no candidate is in anyone's pocket. But it goes beyond this into the surveillance realm, data is ripe for misuse with no driver apparently awake on the bus.

There seems to be a blind faith in algorithms among the elite, as a decision... if not maker... enhancer. Algorithms dumb things down, even as they make them simpler. They facilitate the acceleration of forces within Capitalism that are unsustainable from a GNH and climate change perspective.

Jaguaradi: So you are really down on technology, in its uses as an instrument of... 

If not evil, destruction... (dry laugh). Actually I am, and always have been, a glass-is-half-full kind of guy––and progress, properly formulated, always has been a very difficult point to find. 

Everyone hopes some rebel genius will break through, call him Jesus or Neo... Frieda Kahlo... the outlier (as Malcom Gladwell termed it) has always been present in society and its manifestation is tied to having knowledge that is not shared immediately. Two years in the wilderness is good for that, if you do not drift too far afield.

At some point in the near future, people with a combination of high EQ and superior experiential memory will be particularly sought after, because the skull as a knowledge repository is pretty much impenetrable. If algorithm generators and AI purveyors are the gatekeepers, they haven't got down to the chemical-level neurological processes that drive human thought.

Jaguaradi:  They haven't figured out a way to suck out our thoughts yet, upload them into a huge AI server?

DS: No, they haven't .. not without frying the grey matter at least. And the manifestations they can capture and collate––our art, photography, writing, speech, and movements, are expressed in a tip-of-the-iceberg way. They do not accurately capture the complexity that lies beneath. To draw an analogy, if icebergs breaking off of Antartica were all we were concerned about with global warming, life would be pretty simple. There is a lot going on under the surface and evolution is all about finding niches, weak links.  Binary systems are binary systems––even if they can beat a grand master at Go or Chess, they are operating within a defined system of possibility. No matter how complex it gets, the basis is binary. 

Jaguaradi: Neo reading three dimensional movement within number flows....

DS: Right. Even with Silicon Valley set bent to extract the last possible dollar out of each human interaction, they haven't found a way to disrupt this neuro-chemical phenomenon. We can tell when something offered to us seems too perfect, non-random. And we inject a little randomness into the mix, to counteract. The mutability of logic is what keeps us alive.

I call those who apply this concept "endwriters." They outpace the Internet in words or images–– their unique fingerprint hasn't been exactly replicated by anything in the digital sphere. They dance around the algorithm and control how information manifests in the NOW (neurologically original world). I'll expand on this phenomenon in my planned novel EVEN. Some algos have already taken what I have published and run with it in directions of mere profit.

But they cannot see into my soul, read things that have not manifested in my subconscious––the germ is intact. Endwriter is incorruptible because it is not revealed until the exact right moment and in the correct order––that aspect is algorithmically determined, because the mode of dissemination must match the technological medium.

Jaguaradi: You are not really an entrepreneur, despite fabric potentially having a huge financial impact within the capitalist system. 

DS: My aim is a bit different, I see no reason not to spread the vision, unconcerned about taking credit beyond several hundred readers who got here, somehow. Despite the bots.

Jaguaradi: Despite the "endwriter" monicker, you say that your approach applies to music, visual art––as much as to writing per se.

DS: It even applies to the act of living in an original way. The practice of outpacing the bots and crawlers in a way that preserves privacy, because the algorithm hasn't cracked the code yet. And never can if endwriting is properly practiced. As Leonard Cohen put it, realizing that the only inherent limitations lay within, "I have tried in my way to be free."

Jaguaradi: So if there was an endwriter who created content of such originality that the content could not be codified, replicated? 

DS: He would be Jesus. (They both laugh for a second, draw silent). He would be very sought after, because he gets in there at the end of the digital conversation. He is surfing the tip of the wave so to speak. 

Jaguaradi: And the other content is....

DS: A vast well of meaning wanting to get out but unable to at the exact moment of the NOW, when it has maximum effect. Because these creators inhabit the end of the conversation––the point at which content is shared––they are called endwriters.

Slight confession though...  this was all thought up after the fact. It really comes from endurancewriter, a pre-EVEN breakthrough I had. Something that took root at around the 36th hour of a really crazy poker tournament, the equivalent of trench warfare with cards.

Jaguaradi: Can you give me a concrete example of this digital-outlier-sic-endwriter concept?

DS: You remember Cameron Harris, who wrote all that fake news that got seen at exactly the right time for Donald Trump to get a major boost against Hillary Clinton? That is a very crude, early stage manifestation of the phenomenon. Harris had enough inside knowledge of something not true to get it out the the public as "news" before familiar media outlets and vetters––the traditional gatekeepers if you will––outed it as not true.

Harris was an endwriter in the sense of knowing the current digital cusp and being able to write his pieces with enough credibility and conviction such that it was spread organically through shares among gullible people. Algorithmically spread at first, it took root among humans as intended––it was perhaps designed to influence those for whom English is not a first language and do not read much... and thus sway social network communities that drive our shared concept of the truth.

Jaguaradi: Moving on to your tangible breakthrough moment,  the limerick that got you noticed.  The one about Rick Perry's aha! moment realizing he was tasked with handling nuclear codes....

DS: Yeah, that. 

[TBC?]

#endwriter 


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The Hack (tacos in TJ)

1/18/2017

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Baby Needs to Eat.
Life in TJ is interesting... working on a little noir video to give a taste. Inspirations abound. 

I was just perusing the old Cowachunga files, looking to dust off the novel and set it in Baja, which makes a lot more sense. There was a poem stuck in there randomly and... it was actually not half bad. So here, to tide over those who puzzle over blue moon phrasings:

​The Hack 
​
Life after good grace,
I just want a taste––
lips like honey, wanton,
non-age-restricted
how does this song go?

In the place beyond where 
“Dear PC Officer”articles 
reside, taste has no meaning, 
writing is not delineated 
by what peers consider

short enough
for the virally infected, 
where no choice is to be had
beyond the stark reality of
the hack,
carving his way to survival, 
immemorial, sleepless. 

Jerky energy, between the lines
pure survival, this writing thing
the credit cards maxed, 
the old ties slack, 
burn the house to generate heat. 

Baby needs to eat.
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Separate My Soul (Watch Your Parking Meters) in TJ

1/16/2017

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I have an idea –– let’s call “fake” news “self-serving” news.

There is this sense I have sometimes of being hid in plain view, the complexities of being a writer what they are, I often cloak words in inference, misdirection. The mission is successful––quality prose that garners refreshingly few “eyeballs” among the dedicated readers. If I cannot take that to publishers, boosters, or follower driven revenue-meisters, that is kind of the point.

Bob Dylan, I see why he won a Nobel Prize. If the board is still awaiting a reply… read your parking meters. 
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One thing that irks me as I’ve progressed as a musician is that those who play the best often have the least to say about things I am interested in. For example, drugs––if one has to mention drugs at all when one plays or talks about music, then one has has lost the battle. 
​

Muse, music, amusing. Things that only are expressed under the influence are perhaps best left unsung (tell that to Jimi Hendrix). The natural heart and mind, not immune to herbalized insight–– tubular, chasing sun.
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This is not to say I don't see Fabric as a bit dangerous, on the edge. Beyond money, in the realm of the now, there is the potential to ensure that eight people don't control half of the world's wealth. The idea,  embodied initially in music, is one of wealth shared worldwide, coopting short term capitalist imperatives.
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The Hendrixian concept of everyone coming together  and bringing their own instrument. At first it would be chaos, cacophony, but pretty soon new harmonic vibrations and earth-centered ways of communication would form. Stop me if I’ve said this before––angel variations.
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The fundamental problem (and I have thought this since my days at UCSC, witnessing early raves, Thailand late 1990s––can’t blame age)––if the medium is too loud or techno-centered, the individual demand to be heard cancels out the ability to communicate as peers. A beat driven milieu is fundamentally about a DJ at a console. Not instruments interacting, listening, finding that third-eye mindframe to slip into as a group.
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Tijuana is teaching me lots, I find the people surprisingly cosmopolitan and gracious, despite being an American in a time of Trump and walls. I have a song on Fabric Dos about the wall concept and how misguided it really is considering the intertwined nature of the American West and Mexico.

You still have real cowboys in Northern Mexico, no joke - two-generations-ago brethren of those who voted for Trump. They have more in common with the West and its ruggedly individualistic ways than huckster Trump and Ivanka do. That is why I don’t understand these exurban Trump cowboys very well. Either you have a pioneer spirit or you don’t. 
​

The song about the wall is called “Separate My Soul” and it contains echoes of mid-60s West Coast garage rock,  Argentinian corazon, and a RHCP streetside pulse. In my head, mind you. Hopefully I can pull it off. Playa de Tijuana studio feelers out there… 
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Fabric - Chasing Sun (7 of 12 Tracks Up)
Technology update: About 6 months ago after losing my iPhone at Malasimbo I reverted to a simple SMS text phone. I notched it back another level after arriving California. No phone. Here in Tijuana at the Hotel C I have reverted to an even earlier habit, from the early 2000s––poor Internet connection. Dial-up simulacrum is very liberating indeed. Distractions away!

My goal is to make enough money so that I only need to be online one day a week. There are so many interesting live human interactions to be had. Don’t get me wrong, Device Exists. But does it control us? And does it disable in-depth discourse?

The slow one asked how he could get to the root of everything. The wise one answered, by speeding up. Change gears, expose yourself to new experience––sip carefully from creation’s grail.
​

#endwriter
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Sir Ian and the Brick of Turkish Hash

1/2/2017

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Or, the oddest verified true story I have ever come across.
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Sir Ian at the Rollin' Pin, sans brick.
I have had many interesting conversations in the course of my travels, but none has ever topped this. Let me preface by noting that the 70-something Australian gentleman I met in Dumaguete was a raconteur of the first degree. If his foundation was a career as economics writer with the Australian Financial Times, his most recent foray involved launching a bogus private equity-financed gold mining venture a hundred miles east of Perth. That and the usual old man fountain-of-youth impulse was the reason he was in the Philippines, though he had survived cancer twice and really couldn’t (as he said) be sentenced to prison… In other words, he was someone I didnt quite respect but had lived an interesting life.

Pieces of salmon with lemon and capers falling from his lips, Ian leans in at me with an impish grin and holds his shaky fork steady to make a point––conveying both the mirth of a life of easy vice and the penalty of growing old. As he tells it, he is lucky to be here having this conversation and it is not just the cancer that he beat twice. It was 1970 in the era of “high hippiedome,” when tribes still mingled, just before factions, from overly strident Maoists to platform -shoe Glam rockers fractured England into divisions such as street rebels (Police & Thieves) and the all-night disco crowd.

Ian was a gap year traveler, making his way around the world––bummer that Hendrix died, anyhow. He was in Istanbul, having traveled through Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan, and very much in tune with the fabric of the time. One can only imagine traveling in the days before computers and Oral Fix-It toothbrushes. This was even before Steve Jobs made his epic voyage of lysergic/digital discovery in India. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, not techno, would have been the camper van album of choice. 

In an arid village Ian stayed for a week––no electricity, eating dalum and bulgur––he was offered a brick of what was dscribed as the finest quality local hash. It was so cheap he thought okay and bought it and put it in some subterranean nook of his suitcase. The trip to Istanbul via old Soviet jeeps that doubled as busses took two days. Then it was into Greece by train on a route that skirted the Bulgarian border––a locale infiltrated with intrigue, given the extremes of Ceaușescu-era Communism. At one point Turkish soldiers swept through the cars with guns at the ready, having rooted out a couple malcontents trying to get across the border undetected. (Sean Connery was in the next compartment, with a lithe brunnette assassin).*
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"Sir Ian" to those who humor old men.
​Somehow Ian (Sir Ian, as he was known by the gals at the Rollin’ Pin) made it through and survived the experience, despite sweating (as he put it) balls. He took in Amsterdam over a period of a week and made his way across the channel by ferry to Dover. From there he went up to ––––, north of London, where he had connections. 

Ian was a dedicated entrepreneur and still had the brick of hash intact, as he had been intending to sell it in the UK all along, rather than on the Continent, where the Rolling Stones had just finished a tour. Economics and sociability dictated that if he could simply smuggle the stuff into England he could sell it for double the price and spread Vibes. 

Mission successful, Ian had some good times. He sold his brick off over a period of a month and it was in demand, though certain friends commented that it didn’t have the usual effect. Tokers north of London were not extremely picky, however. 

After a month, Ian was down to half a kilo, more than he had expected to have left. He needed to divest the rest quickly, as he had a flight to New York in two days and a Wall Street internship opportunity that would surely please his folks. He found someone through a friend who wanted to buy the remainder and traveled to Central London, taking a bunk in a local hostel. 

The problem Ian faced was that it wasn’t okay to take a half kilo of hash into the hostel… there were no lockers and no way to keep a stash like that secret. Ian scoped a mishmash of old junk at the end of an adjoining alleyway, placed next to the metal garbage cans for monthly pick-up. It was a discreet, narrow affair, with few windows on the builidings––no one would think to look there in a million years. At 1:00 am , as planned, he strolled out the hostel, winked at the blonde all-night receptionist, and made as if to buy a pack of smokes at the liquor store down the road. Instead, he ducked into the alleyway and rummaged around for his stuff, which he was  to deliver in 10 minutes behind the pub. 

At the moment he was digging up the brick, ready to gain capital for a nice New York lifestyle over the next couple months, a Bobby happened to be walking by on his beat. This was just Ian's bad luck––caught red-handed with a half a kilo of hash, enough to be considered “with intent to sell” Though he was a naif strictly into organics, the police would never believe he wasn’t involved in other stuff. A seven year sentence was minimum for this offense, though it could be commuted after four years for good behavior. By which point his soul would be crushed,  professional prospects dashed.

Ian spent the entire night in an old style London prison below the gallows––he recalls vividly being led up the stairs directly from his cell into a wood-appointed courtroom presided over by powder-wigged magistrate. At the stand, having slept not a wink, Ian felt distinctly sick. The prosecution was beefed up, imposing, and out for blood––the amount of hash was enough that a federal agent had been called in to determine his level involvement in a hypothetical smuggling ring and the appropriate sentence.

Just at the moment when it seemed that the prosecution were going to push for and schieve a full 10 years behind bars, a lab technician burst into the proceedings and conferred with the judge. After about ten minutes of animated discussion the magistrate, known for his tough sentencing rolled his jowly cheeks toward the rafters, wrath d in his eyes and said “I had every intention of giving you a fair taste of English law––but, having analyzed the samples, it has come to our attention that the substance you carried and distributed is camel dung.”

#endwriter
Check Out the Album "Fabric - Chasing Sun"
* This triggered my own recollection of traveling by train across the Czech-Austro-Italian border in 1992, just after the fall of Communism, and having a tall Gypsy with mournful eyes and salami on his breath pop out of a seat compartment under me in the middle of the night, after we passed customs. I shared the compartment with him, not saying a word, for four hours until we reached Udine at around 7am and he blended into the milling crowd.
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    Damon Arvid

    Author of Arisugawa Park. Fabric. Life.

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