39.5 = 51%

tokyo undressed

In six months I'll be 40, which is exciting because it's a) better than the alternative, and b) I should be getting there in better condition - by all metrics - than I ever would have thought possible from the ages of 0 - 35, possibly even later. Life expectancy for a 40-yr old British male is 77.

Not having kids, and not hanging out with folk who do, it's easy to forget about aging. There are few external things of consequence that I see changing in anything other than a cyclical way. The seasons come and go, the years pass, but having dropped out of fashion and popular music, everything pretty much stays the same aside from the constant parade of techno-novelty that's now so ingrained as to just be how things are. The point is, I don't have a kid who not long ago was a mewling infant and is now autonomous and who'll soon be a little adult. In this way I've fallen slightly out of time.

So I was a little shocked the other night when I went for a bowl of ramen and sat across from a mother and her son, about 10 yrs old. Now I plan to live a long time. In all my accounting I aim for 90+, although looking at my family I'm only likely to get 80 or so. Still, I exercise and try and eat right, because good health is always good, and hard-living loses much of it's romance well before middle age, crisis binges notwithstanding. So, if I make it to 90 this kid will be 60, and he'll still have me beat, and I'll die first, while everyone else goes on living.

I looked at the kid and took it as a challenge.

Dry drunk

The typhoon broke this tree, but plants are relentless, and it'll come back even stronger.

At the end of the fourth day with no running water in town, and patience is starting to run out.

We collect rain water and use it sparingly.

This is how some people live all the time, and it can be done, if you lower your standards and drink more beer than water.

Cabin fever

the shining

Into the third day of typhoon rain, and I wouldn't be surprised if tonight's news reports don't see a leap in overdoses, ax murders and deaths by sexual misadventure. Cabin fever is setting in, and if there were two or three months of this then something would break - hopefully my current incarnation - with a new one, better suited to the change in scene, emerging from the dead skin. And then the season would change, and I'd be stuck working from another out-dated and inappropriate model. I'm never going to work at a polar base station.

Wrote the above, saved it, but the rain has now stopped, and the streets are just damp and full of debris. Over 2m of rain fell in some areas of Taiwan, and there's lots of flooding and pieces to pick up. There's also no water in town, supplies cut - floodwater contamination - for perhaps the next five days. Always a thrill at the height of summer.

EDIT: We don't have a TV, so I had no idea of the destruction across the island. Not good.

This must be the place

Home, is where I want to be,
but I guess I'm already there.

Talking Heads, above

It may be mild OCD or just a lack of imagination, but I rode my bicycle around the darkest, quietest streets downtown tonight for 2.5 hrs with this song playing on repeat, and I did it from feeling very good to feeling bad to feeling very good again. And then I went into a bar and washed out the fine body chemistry of caffeine, starvation and physical exertion, to achieve the robust equilibrium I now find myself in.

I'm quiet happy to see time as either an illusion or strictly linear - it's the circular thing that I find unconvincing. So years do not mean a lot to me, nor dates within them. But they serve an important administrative function, and this [mid-May] is the time of year I usually have to renew my visa. Been like that since 1998, but this year I don't need to - I have permanent residency, so no blood test [drugs, AIDS], photos and so on. This place is home.

A fair exchange

Suckling pig from Mid-Autumn Festival barbecue

I finish work at 9pm on Friday night on the other side of town, although that's only a 15 minute scooter ride from home. The joys of high density living. It means I get out of the east district and finish the week in the bright night lights of an area filled with bars, restaurants, pachinko halls and sex work places.

Today I left work feeling good and with enough $ in my wallet to own the night. I went to a barbecue restaurant and sat inside at a corner table and ordered draft beer in frozen mugs and ate only meat. I didn't want to see anyone. I'd found Pessoa again, lost in the shuffle of the books being read / to read heap on a low shelf behind this desk.

Reading in such places is great, I feel like a king. All the distractions are good ones - just the girls in skimpy clothes promoting beer, office ladies after work, and people who bring me food and drink if I ask them. Bending their will, and for what? For the paper I have in my pocket. It's a fair exchange if they're happy to make it.

Style over speed

Click on the picture for something like a mission statement from Copenhagen Cycle Chic

I'm big on riding my bicycle. Tainan is not a big city, and it's easy to get around pedaling so long as you don't need to be somewhere far, soon and not sweating. If you can move at a leisurely pace then every thing is good on a bike, and I'm all about leisurely paces.

Bicycle sales have increased a lot in Taiwan this year, and this is clear in the number of people riding them in the evening and at weekends. A new breed has emerged, generally moving in packs. Riding high-end, Giant cycles and clad in lycra, with face masks and helmets. They can't step off and do anything without attracting attention. This doesn't seem very easy or practical.

My unease about this was just a vague distaste at cycling being set up a hobby or sport rather than a means of transport, and one that demanded a lot of expensive equipment to become part of the club and one of the kool kids. So it was nice to come across Copenhagen Cycle Chic, which takes as it's tag line normal people in normal clothes on normal bikes. Many good pictures of people riding bicycles downtown, and I hope the practice becomes a lot more popular. Cheap, healthy, quiet and clean.

Tokyo Cycle Chic

Market forces

A big increase in bicycles on the roads lately in Tainan, with anecdotes [and Reuters, click the picture] suggesting this is due to gas prices. This city is ideal for bike rides, it's not so big, and many people live downtown. The only drawback is the weather - too hot if you have to be somewhere fast, well-dressed and dry.

It's cool to see market forces in action with such a beneficial outcome.

Town and country

Howard Bloom suggests that evolution works fast enough for humans to have been genetically influenced by cities. I'm not convinced, but what do I know? Anecdotes and prejudices, easily swayed.

Humans adapt well to cities, that's why we're all moving to one, but I ought to find out how second and third generation hunter-gather immigrants survive in an urban landscape, if they're really at a disadvantage to those born into more connectedness, allowing, of course, for the confounding factors of racism and active social exclusion.

The supposedly ideal community - the hunter-gatherer band of 25 or so - can still exist in the city, circles of colleagues and friends. And like Will Self said, you can make a choice to live in a more natural way, following rhythms that make deep sense, although this is far easier for people not to tied to offices, nine to five. At times like this I love my job, free all day Tuesday until 5pm, working on proof-reading, doing other things.

I grew up on and off in small villages, and don't romanticize the life in a genuinely small community. It's dull to be in the middle of nowhere with no books and no like-minded folk, where everybody feels they have an interest and a part of you. The easy anonymity of the city is for me, with all the facilities and opportunities for satisfaction and pleasure.

A decent city has unplanned diversity at all scales, is an organic, emergent whole, a realization of the prevailing ideologies and practices of the inhabitants, freeze-framed and stilted over time. Human artifacts, especially those which are emergent, the product of a huge mass of choices over time and space, are expressions of human nature. Which is not to say that they're necessarily good or healthy, but only that they're likely to conflict with human drives in the most superficial ways. But that's pretty glib - how could it be otherwise? Well...consider the clear inhumanity of a centrally planned community, the expression of one ideology and vision, as opposed to one that has grown up slowly, reshaped by economic, social and environmental variations at a very fine grade. The former is the standard state architecture of empires and dictatorships, grand slabs with no life. The latter is one of the things I love about Tainan. In my neighborhood of a square kilometer we have restaurants, convenience stores, morning and afternoon markets, schools, bars, supermarkets, parks, a hospital clinics, a university, two movie theaters, two swimming pools, tennis courts, a convent, temples, brothels, tailors, dentists, travel agents, hardware stores, bicycle shops, electrical repairs, plumbers, beauticians, barbers, bookstores and more, all amongst the homes of rich and poor people, crammed together, and there's not a dull part of it, unlike in the newer, more sanitized and planned parts of time, where there's nowhere to walk and all your needs demand motorized transport.


I don't think we needed to evolve to adapt to cities. The city was already inside us, and a need for connections and size that was once met by natural landscapes can now be met by urban spaces.

Smog and rust

Check out the smog from China / Taiwan in this NASA image. Tainan is just by the big dirty cloud 3/4 the way down the west coast. This picture makes me want to move to the east.

Had a long bike ride from Tainan city to Salt Mountain in Chigu, which is really just a heap of salt by a salt processing plant that's been turned into a very minor tourist attraction, complete with salty tea, salty coffee and salty popsicles. It's a nice ride to get there but it's not worth visiting.

Came back via Tainan Science Park, which was deserted, with long straight roads past anonymous block buildings in which the future is being dreamed up. The ride was done with a good talk and Q&A by Vernor Vinge on my MP3 player. It's called "What if the Singularity does not happen?", and the text notes can be found here at Vernor's page, while the audio - which is a lot better than the notes - is here. He's a good speaker, perhaps because he's an entertaining sci-fi author aside from being a math professor, although the same is true of Rudy Rucker, and he always sounds slightly dazed, losing his line of thought very easily.

In the Q&A Vinge says that he doesn't really think about the environment, as he thinks there are a) no clear courses of action, and b) the Singularity - which he still thinks is the most likely near future - will be able to address such problems in its own time.

It's interesting that two large groups of smart people have such totally opposing views of the future - environmental breakdown and technological rapture. I enjoy flipping between both positions. I'm getting more and more promiscuous in my thinking, and I think it's a tendency I should encourage.


Having said that, what's the downside of saving energy and keeping things clean?