​I realize there is something outsized about my thinking, strict linearities giving way to the concept that Fabric could be created in such a way as to marry commerce with sustainability––Facebook meets AirBnB meets TripAdvisor meets Agoda.​ If it means an end to the possibility of Trump-like excess, it is by no means the end of money. 

Enough of the natural world survives––though diminishing daily––that stasis can be achieved, through coordinated effort. To those who say that the pattern is already too entrenched, irreversible climate change inevitable (vast methane pockets stored under melting ice caps, ready to rip) I say Let’s Draw the Brakes, Shorty. 

Enough biodiversity exists––carbon sinks, in the parlance––that a livable world could just make a comeback (assuming we solve the flatulence problem). Moreover we may just succeed, with the aid of the Cloud, in taming this global warming beast. Make the world one in which non-exploitative mechanisms ensure that sustainability is a common social and economic interest of all. Income equality (within a band) achieved and environmentally destructive practices de-incentivised to a point where they simply make no sense. First-world and third-world demarcations erased––the incentive is survival.

With the concept of base pay coming to the fore, the next big innovation will be that base pay is set up as a basic human right, irrespective of national boundary. Fabric, Internet-enabled, encourages a sustainable living wage worldwide. 

A significant percentage of first-world declared Fabric revenue will be  into the communities where the transactions originate. For example, 20% of the profits from the Boracay Fabric are funneled back into on-the-ground Boracay nonprofit organizations, transparently operated. Fabric stands as a sustainability-focused buffer between boardroom and the bottom-line.

As the company grows and plows profits into creating  Fabrics in new areas, the percentage increases––maybe maxing out at 40 percent. Maybe testing the limits and becoming, like Wikipedia, a public service that exists to reallocate money in sensible ways and prevent runaway development/environmental degradation.

Taking the incentive out of hit-ad-run commerce––and working toward overarching green goals to which nearly every country (in theory) agrees with. Depoliticizing the money that flows from country to country, making its allocation simply effective.

Spanning the world, Fabric is also intensely localized.

Fabric has team members in each place it operates (cities, just as much as tropical islands) ensuring that:

1. The information on latest events, sustainability-focused businesses, and cool adventures––from pop-up speakeasies to sail-driven island hopping––is backed by empirical, objective data. From people in the know. Locals, long-time residents, travelers, adventurers. 
2. The Fabric revenue tilled back goes to transparently managed nonprofits that are accomplishing real work, at the grass-roots level. Tree planting, growing food, helping people gain skills, raising awareness, purchasing land that is in danger of being "paved and turned into a parking lot."

To answer the conservatives: No, Fabric is not working against economic or political stability. It is working toward a sustainable worldwide living wage and toward eco-sanity through the leveling power of the Internet. Like Facebook, it is equally a site and an app. 

As I run with this flow, I do recognize the obstacles to be surmounted. The old walls are falling, the old guard has never surrendered without coming back to boundaries.*

How is Puerto Gallera, after beachside roughing it in Abra and Sablayan? PG is surprisingly… I don’t want to say quaint, but I want to say hilly. It is ready for a coconut to fall and hit it on the nutsquatch, remind itself it’s still paradise and worth preserving. The touts are surprisingly calm, welcoming. The old Philippine tradition of “smile and the world smiles at you” still applies here. And it sits at  the foot of one of the country's most mountainous stretches of virgin forest.***

Now waiting for Malasimbo with my two flutes and Pandan Island-discovered green bamboo rhythm piece.

​SEO Alert: Damon Shulenberger, the erstwhile EnduranceProsist.

* A classic Dylan mumble.

​Perhaps I saw you, 
you were not on my mind
I slept beneath the pose 
as you parachuted in and
fixed others with your sigh, 
I was outside and I liked that,
the inside seemed too thin

Finding what amounted to 
a thumb to the wise
in your altered soul, 
I wanted something, 
but no one could say 
and I didn’t raise my voice

Funny how people leave 
because they think they should
be wanted.

I was very naive, transfixed 
as I sat in awe of those 
who played with sounds 

I never met them, I swear I didn’t
I just listened.

I could get in bed with a beat like that,
if it exceeded the art of the metronome wizard,
in the bedroom, ducking or not ducking, 
I cannot taste the sweat. 

Eternity has sweat, 
it is not a vacuum packaged stirring of
grafted-on equilibrium, release. 
I find no release in this, 
but I could so marry the energy
If that was my art. 

Heavy making food, 
the kind you try to laugh off but somehow can't, 
the type that disrupts the equilibrium so much 
that you seek out more, 
now you have heavy-accepting pants

The kind that accept the ungainly beast 
you have become, 
that don't mind hearing you snore. 
They expand and expand, 
and still the urge to give them more, 
until at first you hear a tear and then a snap––

Now you are ready for…. 

Well, it happens sometimes, a sense that somehow everything will come through. The beach is just empty enough, the feeling rough and semi-backpackerish, not every nook and cranny of Asia is slated for over-exploitation. Though it is coming, I am sure. As is Arisugawa Park. Okay, I will not lie... losing my computer was a major blow, I put in much revision work with Nils that can never be recovered, unless said device magically pops up on the FindYourMac app (reward offered, no questions asked). 

But you know I am quite sure now that it is only a matter of time––with the half-hearted agent out of the equation, I am truly the  driver of this ship. Sure, Cowachunga may languish, but it is time to put Arisugawa Park out there for the world. Reputations have rested on slimmer accomplishments than a single book––Just ask Harper Lee (RIP, along with Umberto Eco).

I am thinking Ari Park will appear in serial format, one section on this here blog every couple days. Hopefully that gets the ball rolling, to the point where an audience emerges. Are people still paying attention, reading? Publishers apparently believe they are not. But I counter that with a nod to the deceptive poll results in this roller coaster election cycle. You think you know until you don't.  

If you ever think you have it bad, just remember there is only one way to get a tricycle that far up a car with no apparent damage. The dragon eats its tail. ​

SEO alert: Damon Shulenberger, aka endurancewriter. For uplift listen to this holy grail Bob Marley recording, 1975-06-10 Quiet Knight Club, Chicago.

On an as-yet semi-undeveloped beach, unnamed, construction proceeds apace. Enjoy it while it lasts, before the outflow of the urban-maddened drives another place under, in a blanket of speculation. The outflow pressures of being so close to Spratly Islands, North Korea, conduits of unchecked greed. The urge to wash dirty laundry in ways that disturb others' ways of being.

Making It Rain distracts on so many levels... a feeling of abundance, gratitude, and then the old enslavement––the necessity to prove oneself by making noise. Human cancer condition, I have no idea how to contain this spread. The old bounds of the known and workable, soft power, buckle in the face of those who come equipped with hard hats and newly minted cash. The uniforms are there, if necessary, to ensure that bank-mandated transgressions are fulfilled. ​

And against this... Fabric? If anyone had time to listen, if I had time to listen. If anyone paid me to listen. There it is again, the money side of the equation. Fantasy of actively working to fight deterioration when my own self worth is tied to outmoded metrics of progress. Am I a foot soldier in someone else's battle? Can I lead without leading? I never think clearly in the heat of getting things done. Yet without the physical act of giving orders, there is no movement. Human condition... the lost potential to undo our mistakes.* I do not want to lead, Johnny Appleseed. Someone take this idea and propagate. Let my ramblings remain loose, close to the source.

Movement through unmovement. Transgressive fantasy that the world can accommodate––not just accommodate, but actively promote a natural reality that is far from soft. The underbelly tensility of natural structures that are far more on-the-edge than the hardest of the self-proclaimed hardcore. Thriving between the cracks until the time comes to reach, push up several billion buried tendrils.** Human potential, plant-like force. Anointed by an app, an underlying system of content with directive, bite. Toward... yes, I know this sounds inconclusive, as it necessarily must... freedom, perpetuation. 

Once you define yourself by what they have set in place, you are lost. Enter a frozen state, following the chumps and Trumps, while the atmosphere ignites in intensifying patterns, bringing us ever closer to doom-laden scenario 134.3. How to freeze, unfreeze, and in doing so slightly alter these patterns over time––find alchemy in the constainments that bind us tight to the furnace? Fabric... a tighter pattern, planted feely in the subsoil of human desire, that supplants at the  foundation, climbs up and through the reinforced structure and supercedes.***

SEO Alert: Damon Arvid Shulenberger, undoubtedly a winner. Enudrancewriter deluxe. 

*Gamefied environmental trojans usurp soccer and WoW. 
**Enlightenment and self preservation, the poles meet.
*** Flow courtesy of Radiohead - Live At Großer Sendesaal des RBB, Berlin 04/07/2000.

Despite having had my laptop stolen at a Makati hostel (targeted, taken from backpack under the bed while I went to the bathroom)* and dropped an agent (for the nonce), I am feeling oddly liberated. 

The implications of the EnduranceWriter concept and what it means have finally hit home. In a world in which  talent, audaciousness, is not enough to breach the gates, a publicly disseminated calling card with my art, poetry, music, tears, suffices. It is all here for future archeologists to unearth. Or not.

We have only one life––within its strict delineations, how many chances to get it right. Every time I post I have a chance to attain immortality. With no editor breathing down the neck, no marketing director, no word counter or bean counter.

This is something right. 

SEO Alert - Damon Shulenberger, aka loose-necked EnduranceWriter type.

* Hundreds of flute and mumbled word files lost, a month of revision work on Arisugawa Park. Photos, art. Yet I am laughing Bwahahaha.

Along the treelined canal where people work and play, life goes on with an undercurrent that has more ties to past realities than present disruptions. I encounter tattered, almost pagan Catholic votives that protect, a cock being groomed for the fight. 

Above, a Santa Nino ("little Christ"): many families pass these on through the generation, as a way of protecting the home. In the market, these seems to indicate that the goods are of good, honest quality.  A parade of all the Santa Ninos in the baranguay with floats, taken to the Church where they are blessed by the priest.

I buy carrots, bananas, dalandan, okra. I stop too long to gaze at ancient herbs and votives, an ancient mirror that I at first mistake for hanging fish. A kid comes by and points me to other, more creepy objects high above - they were taken out at the recent Santa Nino festival to "let the baby Jesus play." I emerge with a shiver into daylight.

A coward and not for the first time, 
with a sense of deja vu––
The bending of time around 
corners he hoped to forget,
The ultimate suffering of nonending.

There never was an ease with 
the pack, he recalls,
The fangs of human intensity 
were not reconsidered,
He stepped back from the edge 
more times than 
he could remember. 

Uneasy truce between twin 
warriorspeak embers-- 
Latent contrition,
Enshrinement in another's halls--
Huddled around PC campfires
observing all kinds of real neglect.

I have been wondering in recent months, with the potential self-publishing of Arisugawa Park on my mind, whether I was a little harsh in my assessment of Japan as a country that places firm glass-ceilings in the paths of capable women. Surely something must have changed, I thought, in the 10 years since I lived in the country. Never fear... if an article in The Guardian is to be believed, Japanese mainstream society is still marching in lockstep with stifling conformity.

After reading the article, I would be tempted to add a bit more about the showbiz equation of things... if I could be bothered. Girl groups and boy groups, OMG... no dating clauses, shave your head in contrition for having a boyfriend. As reported:

Last September, a 17-year-old member of an all-female “idol” band was ordered to pay 650,000 yen (£3,800) to her agency after it was revealed she had a boyfriend – a violation of the no-dating clause in her contract. To add to her troubles, her relationship caused the breakup of her six-member band.

“As long as she was a female idol,” the judge, Akitomo Kojima said, “a ban on dating was necessary to obtain support from male fans”. 

The big question is of course how so much music and pop culture with so much vapidity can be so amply rewarded. Following the rules is apparently of much greater importance than originality. Flute solos be damned. For this reason, I'm pretty sure my book about Japan will not be read in Japan until it a) is a MEGA-hit in the Western world or b) I am dead and buried. 

Despite this, I persist in considering Ari Park a love song of sorts to Japan. If nothing else, it is a tribute to the unique experiences I had as an eikaiwa sensei over a four year period.

If this sounds to you like foreplay for the actual releasing of the  book, why (flutter of virginal, no bf-clause eyelashes that carefully accentuate post-double eyelid surgery, blue contact lens "smell the fart" gaze, long legs disappearing into plaid mini-skirt) YES it is. 

Below: Scenes from a one-night layover in Tokyo, en route from San Francisco to Manila.  Nonconformity in apparent conformity: the questing eye sees all kinds of micro-signals, from breaking in the ivy to a Geisha breaking bad.

I remember reading a book about humans, I believe it was Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape, at an impressionable age. There was one part that really stuck in my mind. It was all about how monkeys studied in a lab would create 'art' that took quite a bit of time and effort, and was––in many behavioral scientists' estimation––original.

The beginning of the end was rewarding these monkeys with food for each piece finished. They started pumping out art right and left, of inferior quality. I realize that a large part of my journey as artist has been avoiding situations of immediate reward, from receiving applause to making money or getting laid. These extrinsic markers of artistic worth seem to cheapen everything. And so I subsist and (yes, I'll admit) find a way to 'live the life.' A couple hundred die-hard views a day is my comfort zone. I do not want the trappings of anything. 

Today, let me take you on a stroll through old Makati, walking cane at my side. As the "opo" incident demonstrated, I am a semi-ignorant foreigner. I revel in that, because my cognition of that around me  exists at a pre-verbal level. If I learned Tagalog I would... understand everything. Banality is such a curse. 

This walk took me past a ferry operation that plies its trade all day, charging folks 2 pesos a ride to cross a river that has two bridges less than 5 minutes walk away. It is habit, conviction perhaps that keeps people making a truncated aquatic journey from Makati to Madaluyong that has probably been in existence for centuries.

Reminds me a lot of when I first came to live in the former fishing-village streets of suburban Tokyo (now separated from the bay by miles of landfill). Tradition is a hard thing to budge and thank god for that. Every time the sheer scale of development makes me lose balance I walk a hundred yards and find it in 15 peso lugaw, the 50 peso bifsteak, in the friendly, understanding smiles of those immersed in the micro.