Views or no views, the writing goes on. The fabric concept, while complex, continues to gain pace. Rather than walking around the island, I am focusing on the square patch in which I am located, 30 seconds from the beach. While not an epicenter of the major corporate construction it is, I am sure, in people's sights.

I have been coming here four years and have seen many changes and many things stay the same––what has not happened is a wholesale upending by major developers. The owner of my place, set back among nicely unkempt verdure, is a really nice older couple who had the original nipa beach resort in the then paradisical Boracay, 40 years ago. They still own the land and lease it in 5-10 year increments. 

The property has become hemmed in by five-story raw concrete to-the-property-line Korean dive establishments (note that my new favorite bar on the lagoon, izakaya-like in its intimacy and full of cool touches,  is also Korean). Yin and yang––no favoritism––define fabric in a way that does not avoid, but does not call out, ethnicity. 

My mission right now is to find out exactly where what has turned (with the usual Habagat rains) into a  creek-sized stream of raw sewage, carved into the sand, flowing directly into White Beach, is coming from and why––as usual in the Phils (and probably  many countries) no one does anything about it or recognizes its existence.

It may be (probably is) coming from new impactful resorts on the property owned by the old couple i stay above. It is flowing out just beside Army Navy, a Philippine-birthed burger and burrito chain that makes surprisingly tasty burritos from (I hear) sustainably sourced ingredients. It extends back some way and I believe the culprit is.... mum's the word. There is also the issue of the constantly overflowing water on my stretch of the beach path. It did not exist before the dive resorts went in and migrated toward front beach with last year's jarring installation of TGIF Fridays in place of some New Zealand owned chill spot, Mint. The motorbikes, which used to not come down the small windy foot-appropriate path, do not help.

A lot to be solved, this small Fabric project is kind of a template. I think the concept is best expressed through David's quest in the fictional Habagat.

#fabric

That is, as soon as I get a little more Arisugawa Park out––this Hayao scene, shifting through dangerously seductive Roppongi, is constipating my creative process. This always happens when there is new writing to be done. I  spend days sort of procrastinating, shifting things in my head, before even a trickle will come out. At some point I just plug my nose and jump in. 

Writing this blog is a little like playing a four holed bamboo flute. It looks deceptively simple. Yet playing the flute for more than a minute without  annoying too many people is an art. Getting the fabric message and purpose across without making enemies. Would have to be Jesus to do that––oh wait, Jesus wasn't batting .1000 in that area either.

Lao Tzu? Ghandi? 

#endwriter

As I wind my way through the process of establishing a literary reputation solely on my own, I have the consolation of never having taken the business of writing too seriously. At least in the way that guardians of the Canon propose ––

Either writing fluidly inches its way into my imagination, and through some process of transference becomes part of what others experience, or it does not. With the cloud novel and the traditional non-feed tied URL I can effectively short circuit all external control functions, run free.

In the long run, we trust the musician we admire to find those notes, right or wrong. Half of the fun is watching ideas form, cohere, and disintegrate, and form again along other channels. 

Many acclaimed works, the vast majority I would say, have reflected the current status quo, hit the zeitgeist on the nail. Reinforced what people were already thinking and could not readily express. With the Pandora's box of live feeds not only open but infinitely streaming, it is very hard to find way stations to take stock–– routes that reach the requisite number of people to constitute, if not a movement, a tangent of forward-evolving thought. 

The blog site as an island of my own making. A bit of volcanic rock sticking out on the beach. 

I am not zeitgeist immune, but I am intentionally divorced from the mainstream that considers possessions and property any sort of sum of worth. Tethered and tied, in a self contained box––for better or worse, the anxiety-inducing overlay I experienced growing up is not my preferred mode. 

There is a certain clarity in the best writing that is not exceptionally sexy. It is not suited to  device attention spans, despite the valiant efforts of Tweet poets and their longform Medium contenders. 

Back to a simple SMS texting Samsung it is amazing how quickly my mind snaps back into a less frantic mode that is tuned toward reflection. How quickly we flip through smartphone channels on our way to nowhere. 

Meanwhile, in endurance mode, I keep pushing on in the type of minute gradations of progress that serious prose requires. Not concerned about getting the words exactly right, concerned rather about how vividly I convey impressions that are by nature amorphous and unsettled. 

Procrastination, that sinking feeling––10 years removed from a place I never fully understood, how can I ever get Hayao's decent into the Tokyo underworld exactly right? I cannot, unless I convince myself that what I made up from half-glimpsed memory is true. 
​
​#endurancewriter

It's so strange to me, seeing a tropical island literally in the process of getting loved to death and no one moving a finger (that I can see) to change how things are done. Instead of surveys of Boracay to identify what paradise still remains, the only surveys taken seem to be by greedy, plant-new-building developers, financed from the outside.

Those locals who own the land, who could influence..... well... divide and conquer is one way of looking at it. Another is that even the locals are based in Malay, Kalibo, and have extended families of hundreds (if not thousands) who are not extremely concerned about the long term fate of one small island that they depend on to feed them till the Golden Goose runs out. Long term planning that benefits the common good.... a shaky concept. 

Logically I should not be concerned either––and yet, I am.  We must learn from the mistakes of the 20th century, we must go beyond growth for growth's sake, unbought and unsold condo units suddenly replacing what people lived with––not on top of––for millennia. Let's give a nice middle finger to the Trumps and the legions of similarly minded developers. Let's not let something that is perfect as is (and capable of supporting well-thought out in-fill development) become flash-sale material, desperate to attract pan-Asian package tourists and continue a tsunami force process of degradation.*

The questions concerning how fabric would function as a platform, taking advantage of the world's cloud infrastructure investments of the past decade, remain unclear. I do believe that it should be possible to leapfrog technologies that did not exist in the past, and create a new Google or Facebook-level experience. I do believe that many in the Silicon Valley community recognize that disruption is necessary, the more so as consolidation threatens to create a new hegemony and ruling class––profits parked meaninglessly in offshore accounts that beget outrageous luxury developments that are, by the way, threatening fabric. 

A key question is what country to incorporate fabric in––I think it must be one that is adept in cross-national transactions and will allow money to flow in and out with minimal taxes. I do not want Uncle Sam to get 40 percent of fabric's profits (generated by Agoda/Priceline type transactions) before they get back to the local fabric region, funding necessary fabric projects. 

At the same time, money inflow will need to be set up through NGO type structures wherever possible, such that the government of, say, the Philippines, does not take its own hefty non-transparent cut of the money going in. Local governments will need to be worked with, not against,  ensuring that all money so allocated to a specific fabric region is used effectively––not in the usual ways. The key to why fabric can overcome these myriad systemic complexities is that money talks. Widely adopted, the platform will generate substantial revenue and have teeth. Very few local or national governments will refuse investment funds that create local employment. You can become a citizen of the US by investing a certain amount of money that creates x jobs. Of course money finds a way. 

To really work, a platform of sustainability tied to  transaction flows needs to function better than the system around it and like an insect molting, ultimately take over the husk of the unsustainable past––create a future in which growth itself is not the goal, but environmental sanity and Gross National Happiness. 

Now I need to create quality descriptions of the businesses worth supporting, the places worth appreciating, not surveying. Lonely Planet style content, with a (to-be-defined) matrix of recommendation factors. Starting with a baseline that the business is interested in the longterm future of the place, is not a to-the-property-line developer. Considering that I have no money, this must happen on my own time, when and where it will. I am not a salesperson, just an impassioned earth citizen with a dream.

I wrote a complex cloud novel on my own time, I can do this. 
​
*fabric will ultimately be designed for urban areas as well, this is the "loved to death" tropical island template.

Here is the business plan-like description I came up with for a sustainability-minded resort owner in Boracay interested in the concept: 

What is Fabric?

Fabric is a (Facebook/Agoda-like) mobile app and (Wikipedia/Lonely Planet-like) desktop site. A knowledge resource that combines transactional capacities with fun, intuitive sharing and social media elements. Its aim is to describe and  promote  great businesses, events, artists, and other things going on in specific local regions (“fabrics”). Businesses are rated according to a sustainability-focused, locally curated matrix that includes elements such as recycling, preserving natural beauty and features, and other traditional elements of value, such as quality of food, ingredient sourcing practices, employee satisfaction, hygiene, and others. 

The bottom line is that travelers now have a simple map-based array of consumption choices, pointing them toward places to spend money and enjoy their time in ways that minimally impact the natural beauty (that attracted them) and promote responsible green practices. Tourists too time-pressed to get to know which businesses are good and which are not now have a simple filtering and decision-making system at hand.

Map-based, geo located interface, green dots good, zoom in for detail, lots of simple filters “cheap eats” “happening music” “local fabric projects” “outdoor adventures” "romantic spots" etc. Click on a dot, a small Lonely Planet-style popup with a paragraph about the business/place appears. 

The underpinning concept of this beta system is to create an organically growing network of fabrics around the world, urban and rural. Each fabric has a "board" that includes local sustainability-minded residents and business owners, as well as high level contributors––seasoned travelers, perceptive souls. Curated Lonely Planet content meets Tripadvisor, with transactional capacities that go where Agoda, Priceline, Hostelz, Uber, etc. go. 

Sharing can be tied into existing social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Medium, and set up as its own thing through a Wikipedia-like website that goes in depth and describes social-environmental issues facing each fabric in detail. 

The disruptive aspect of fabric is that, not only does it direct commerce to worthy businesses, but 80 percent of the transaction fees (the 15 percent Agoda charges on each transaction) captured go directly back to on-the-ground NGOs, bypassing inefficient local governments in solving persistent issues, from trash and sewage, to planting trees, protecting land, sustainable development. 

The ultimate aim is to use the infrastructure that Facebook and transaction providers have set up (and have sunk costs to recover from) in a more altruistic way that promotes Gross National Happiness and seeks to counter global warming and major habitat loss. Making use of renewable resources, creating a connected world of collective fabrics that share a common aim and have financial resources distributed locally, in ways that are most impactful.

#endwriter fabric

Porch thoughts on the political circus:

So the $100 philosophy question is: if you have a Presidential candidate who endorses use of nukes and blanket bans against ethnic groups––makes rash decisions that might cause untold human suffering and set back the fight against global warming 50 years––do you, for the continued integrity of the system, allow him to stand for President?*

To put it another way: Germany had to learn the hard way that democracy has a lot of loopholes for loonies to pass through.

​ ‪#‎NeverTurnip‬

I have been into cartoons lately. This is what happens when a cartoonist goes off the rails and no longer cares about an editor's approval ("last week" refers to Mr. Trump's even more excoriating performance at the Republican National Convention). Love it.***

​The sheer verbosity may shield you from the fact that Opus, true to penguin form, has ordered a perch smoothie, hold the flounder.

And then there is this Frankencalvin stroke of sheer brilliance, of which it was difficult to select and share just one. 

Sometimes I take time to abbreviate my great ideas on Facebook:

"I have a platform called fabric in mind that deals with profits leaving communities through captured Internet middle man profiteers. (And fosters sustainability, income equality, and Gross National Happiness). As a beta in Boracay it creates a native-style paraw of sustainably harvested wood and anahaw fronds; a flute-djimbe-acoustic guitar musical concept; a Lonely Planet-esque travel app; and a starter fabric project focused on recycling (separation still does not occur on the island at scale)."***

A long walk a ragged crawl, onion town.

#endwriter

* Assuming a reasonable chance of winning, which is no longer so clear.

** Hopefully it is ok to share, hyperlink and invoke the cartoons above, under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

*** I have talked with numerous locals and small business owners, getting ideas. The actual project should commence in early October.

​All Rights Reserved - Damon Shulenberger.  #fabric​ #AriPark