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Not for a lack of sun
Kungs Cafe Lao, no apostrophe,
is a haven, a cave that smiles –
discrete, it doesn’t ask questions.
Dried gourds hang from bamboo rafters.
The coffee, Lao coffee, is thick and sweet.
Pots of dangling greens interrupt the sunlight;
strings bearing delicate ceramic figures
curl slowly when the fan’s arc curves.
The side wall is the same, and more:
butterflies, red frangipani,
dok khoun (literally ‘golden shower’),
who knows what else. And roses
on the tabletops absorbing light
French conversation, catching phrases
among the clutter of kitchen sounds –
blending, chopping, arranging,
tap noise and pot lid sounds
popping out from behind the corner.
The Americans are talking about
revisiting old students and feeling
like a rockstar, hopping off the
brand new Chinese train (it’s only
two generations since LBJ rained hell, yet
it’s the Chinese everyone’s in two minds about)
and being welcomed by screaming children.
I know the feeling of aggrandisement
that comes from people shrieking my name,
or ‘welcome’, or even, by mistake, ‘bye-bye’,
and I know what it’s like to be a citizen
of a country complicit in genocide,
to plant one experience in another soil and
watch it gently wilt.
Changes of plan, masala chai, and ancient wisdom
I’m eating Indian food in a hotel in Vientiane – dal, vegetable pakoras, coriander sauce and masala chai. You know, I had dinner with three German women in Vang Vieng (a town north of here) at an Indian restaurant, and not one of them had ever had masala chai = had never lived! They didn’t even know what it was! So I said they should try mine, and their lives were changed forever. And then I started dreaming about the ice cream I used to make in Sri Lanka, with homemade coconut milk and a masala chai base, with whisky-soaked raisins. God almighty. So anyway I had to move to this hotel from a hostel, where I spent the last five nights, because I needed peace and quiet. My social battery gradually emptied, and when I topped it up with alcohol, the alcohol beat me round the head. Tale as old as time. Now I have air conditioning and Indian food, and I’m the one laughing.
I just wrote a poem about how chance encounters can feel serendipitous. Things fall into place when you least expect them to. You can read it here. And, naturally, in the writing of it, I went on a journey through all the meetings I’ve had with people while on this journey, especially since the beginning of this year, when I’ve been travelling independently.
And I dwelt on a conversation I had with a Nigerian British man called Dele and a Bolivian woman called Maria, which was one of those conversations you could transcribe and, with some editing, make into some pretty entertaining TV dialogue. Lots of callbacks and cute bits of self-referentiality. We were talking about China, obviously, and at some point, Dele said something along the lines of, ‘the things we take for free often turn out to be the most costly’. In other words, be careful what you take for granted. As an aphorism, it’s not dissimilar from ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’, which is almost bomb-proof. I might have my mum to thank for that one, along with ‘buy cheap, buy twice’.
All of these phrases, to varying degrees, discourage optimism. What if I buy cheap (from, er, China) and it turns out great? What if something looks too good to be true and it turns out to be as good as it looks? But optimism can only take you so far, and if it’s blind, it won’t take you very far at all. You have to pair it with something. And anyway, the point of an aphorism isn’t that you can turn to it for answers whenever you’re in a bind. An aphorism is like a torch in the darkness. It provides a limited view. Or it’s a lighthouse, keeping you off the rocks.
And then, a day or two later, there was something I said that Maria interpreted as containing some sort of wisdom, and she wrote it down. If this has happened to you then you, too, know what it’s like to feel like a sage. We were talking about adaptation, and how unforeseeable events can derail even the most well planned and well researched itineraries. (This recently happened to me. The trip from Vientiane to Siem Reap is in two parts: part one, to Pakse, is on a bus capable of transporting a bicycle; part two, from Pakse into Cambodia and down to Siem Reap, is in a minivan, which apparently cannot guarantee carriage of a bicycle. So I’m cycling straight into Thailand instead, across the First Thai–Lao Friendship Bridge, and will shake my groove thing from there.)
I digress. I said something like, ‘a plan you made yesterday is better than one you made a year ago, because it was made by a more recent version of you’. Because – and I appreciate this now more than I ever have, and it’s especially true during periods of flux and accelerated development – you are not the same you that you were then. The plan you made a year ago, or ten years ago, can be a source of comfort. Falling back on it can feel safe. But in doing so, you run the risk of ignoring your present self – a self with different priorities. Growth happens when you update your priorities.
This is getting very self-helpy. Eugh. But it’s super relevant to my current situation, and I daresay relevant to many others. It’s part of the reason I’ve always been so baffled by people who knew what they wanted to be when they were older. What I’ve wanted to be has constantly changed. And sure, this has, thus far, held me back from sticking with anything long enough to master it. I’ve played many instruments and currently play none. I’ve tried writing in several formats, but never really stuck with any of them. I’ve never committed fully to a job in a way that allowed for much professional development.
And when I conceived of this trip, it looked a particular way. Actually, I idealised that vision to the point where I became inflexible regarding it, and it clashed with reality. For years, I deferred to this plan that I’d made in the past, all the while doing very little to ensure that it was a plan that worked for me/us in the present. I didn’t update my plan to suit our (then-)present circumstances. And in doing so, I ignored my own advice – advice that was sufficiently wise to be written down!!! I bet there’s an aphorism for that. Or a paradox. Oh yes, it’s the Solomon Paradox.
King Solomon was known for his legendary wisdom, and loved dishing out advice. But he struggled to follow the advice he gave to others. For example, he warned others not to marry many wives, saying ‘he who loves many women is not wise’. He then proceeded to marry 700 women, and had 300 concubines to boot. Oh, Solomon. I mean, come on! He also wrote about the futility of building large monuments, describing such things as ‘vain’. And then he built a big temple. So, he was able to impart wisdom to others but not heed it himself. Personally, I don’t think I impart much wisdom to others. But I am trying to be a bit more deliberate with the wisdom I follow.
Thanks for reading, you lot! ♥
The mark we made on the earth
You came at precisely the right time,
flash and twinkle, skin, eyes and bones
in a heap on the step, trundling into view
like a carabao – long neck, head up –
smile swinging in a threadbare hammock
not far from the river, do you remember?
Neon-lit by the glimmer from a glass cabinet
whose light, reflecting off key lime pie,
gave passers-by a cartoon-like,
disembodied quality.
Whenever someone leaned in to deliberate,
gaze dancing from one item to the next,
I would try to predict their choice:
apple crumble, date slice, chocolate cake.
Banoffee crumbs lingered on my fork.
We were talking about the difference
between a religious experience and a spiritual one,
or between Maoism (as defined by the Shining Path)
and Mao Zedong Thought – he was a poet
who didn’t like the term ‘Maoism’ –
about Biafra, Kingslee Davey, salt flats and
mineral deposits.
And then there you were again,
in the street, shoulders draped in sky-blue silk,
Yumeji’s theme playing somewhere offstage;
once a geologist, forever a homeopath;
nonprofit employee in pachyderm pants
disguised as a Spaniard in search of wheels.
You bought a sack of ferns
from the old ladies on the street
before trading it back in the village for
tubes of fresh rice cake.
We snatched them off you like children.
Your skin was soft brown. We spoke in German.
Unafraid of details, you described to me
a recent sexual encounter with a Latina woman
(her first of the kind) and an exuberant,
I remember you saying ‘pneumatic’, young man.
It could’ve been Ha Long Bay.
Draught beer was 25p a glass and cold.
Elsewhere it was free drinks from seven till eight,
happy water and off-brand cola.
You insisted I come back in the morning
for iced coffee and coconut crackers
but didn’t hang around long enough to see me
vault the fence. I keep a mental picture of you
in my wallet, wearing a mustard-yellow toque,
driving a taxi-yellow scooter,
screaming into the blackness of a cave.
I could never guess which cake they would go for,
back along the river; the options were too many.
We all have our different selves.
The kitchen twirled around you,
around the Mexican food we made
and the marks we left on the earth,
all skin and eyes and twinkling summer rain.
The time was exactly right, and will be again.
Notes from northern Laos: Vieng Xai to Nong Khiaw
Everything they told you about Laos is true. It’s basically a magical land. There are whole squadrons of albino carabaos, the earth and dust are tinged with a Seuss-esque purple, kids run along the road in Spider-Man costumes and onesies, hollering ‘bye-bye, bye-bye!’ as you pass by, men and women of all ages beckon you into their houses to drink potent lao-hai out of bamboo straws from large earthenware pots, cows trot skittishly alongside, nimble as foals, and the cockerels truncate their calls so that they cry a staccato ’cockerdoodld-’. Laotians eat more sticky rice than the people of any other country.
While here, it’s been impossible not to think about, learn about, and weep at the ongoing suffering caused by, America’s bombing campaign of Laos.
The Indochina wars of the 20th century brought ruin to much of Southeast Asia, and in some ways, history regards the Laotian Civil War of 1959 to 1975 as a footnote to the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese call it the American War), but pretty much as soon as you get here, you can see the carnage it caused. The roads are broken. There are bomb craters. Unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to maim and kill people working in fields and the jungle. Horses swallow sub-munitions that explode in their stomachs. Ducks stumble upon fragments of cluster-bombs. In Vieng Xai you can tour the caves where the Pathet Lao – the communist resistance fighters – hid during the worst years, from 1964 to 1973. You can snoop round the bedrooms and living quarters and kitchens and meeting rooms of the generals, and walk through the unlit, rock-walled maternity wards, where women gave birth and nursed their babies in the dark while American bombers searched desperately for innocent people to kill.
From the UXO Lao website:
- In excess of 270 million
Estimated number of sub-munitions (in Lao they’re called ‘bombies’) from cluster bombs dropped over Lao PDR (Laos’ formal name: Lao People’s Democratic Republic) between 1964 and 1973. - 30%
Estimated failure rate of sub-munitions under ideal conditions. - 80 million
Estimated number of sub-munitions that failed to explode. - 446,711 or 0.55%
Number or percentage of estimated unexploded sub-munitions destroyed by UXO Lao from 1996 to May 2010.
The French army withdrew from Laos in 1954 and it became officially independent. Except it wasn’t actually independent, because no one would leave it alone. Before it started bombing the proverbial and literal shit out of this unbelievably beautiful landlocked nation, the US was funnelling money into its elections (and was paying 100% of the Lao military budget in 1955, paid its generals’ salaries, etc), manipulating it politically from the inside and hoping against hope that the bloody communists (with support from the east, aka North Vietnam, and later the Soviet Union) would stop being communists. It supported the 1960 neutralist coup and simultaneously supported covert counter-coup efforts. Ultimately, election fixing, diplomatic meddling and funds-funnelling failed to win an entire country over to a political ideology that was completely alien to them (and whose inherent Westernness smacked of its colonial past). A Soviet military air bridge into Vientiane, flying artillery and gunners in to reinforce the Neutralist/Pathet Lao coalition may have been the straw that broke imperialist America’s back, because the US then went into overdrive. It flew in napalm-carrying B-26 Invader bombers from Taiwan, then T-6 Texans (gunner planes), and H-34 helicopters.
But 1964 is when the shit really hit the fan. The Baffler, my favourite magazine, recently published a piece called ‘Inglorious Bastards’ comparing Joe Biden’s domestic/foreign policy dynamic with that of Lyndon B Johnson, who was president from 1963 to ’69.
What connects them, writes Toby Jaffe, is their ‘stubborn faith in outdated modes of thinking during periods of historical tumult, as well as their complicity in the failed politics that brought about the tumult in the first place. For Johnson, this most obviously revealed itself in the Vietnam War. For Biden, this has most explicitly and recently revealed itself in his callous, fly-by-night response to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which is now spiraling, unchecked, into a broader regional conflict.’
The audioguide you get when you tour the caves in Vieng Xai contains some nauseating details. Laos’ population at the time of the US bombing campaign, from 1964 to 1973, was more or less 1 million. And the US dropped 2 million tons of explosives on the country, = 2 tons per person. Laos is famously the most heavily bombed country (per capita) ever. Villages have been destroyed that no one will ever know existed, because there was no record of them. Too remote, too disconnected, so uninvolved in the vagaries of geopolitics as to render their destruction entirely meaningless. During this period, villagers would soak their white clothes in puddles and roll them in the mud, so as to be less visible to the bombers that flew overhead. One captured pilot said his orders were simply to look for the colourful crests and bills of ducks and chickens: signs of human habitation. So villagers culled any animals that were too brightly coloured. Many Laotians had never even heard of America. They had no idea of why they were being killed, what the Cold War was, or what was meant by their meaningless slaughter. All they knew was that at dawn, the planes started, and a while after dusk, the noises would stop. Knowing any more might not have made it any better. Either way, the injustice fuelled their anger, which strengthened their resolve and motivated their resistance.
I came to Laos with high hopes but few expectations. As with other countries that have a history of being brutalised, either by hosting proxy wars or being seemingly beaten into submission by regional superpowers, it’s had quite a profound effect on me. Cycling through tiny hill villages, I’m greeted with a whole range of facial expressions, and I find myself wondering how much of their own history these people know, and how that knowledge affects how they interpret and respond to my presence. Going days without seeing any other foreigners, it’s clear they don’t see many white faces. And their reactions run the gamut from extraordinary excitement to something that looks like suspicion, or wariness, and it’s hard to predict. Age is an indicator but not a reliable one. I sit on a hill somewhere under the midday sun, with forested hills expanding in all directions, and imagine planes flying overhead, scouring the trees for signs of human life. Overall, it feels a world away from the hills of neighbouring Vietnam: there’s an economic disparity, but topography is also important. This entire region of northern Laos is basically mountainous, and has historically been hard to access, meaning it’s ‘retained’ a ‘simpler’ way of life, while most of Vietnam is within an hour or two’s drive from a substantial town or city – it has a very developed coastline, multiple urban centres, hubbub, sprawl.
Tigers used to roam over much of the forested north, but they now only occupy isolated and fragmented patches of land – 7% of their historical range across Asia, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. The Vieng Xai caves audioguide said that well into the 20th century, the way you’d find out there were tigers in the area was by ‘stepping on one’. Zoiks!
I recently found out about Manifa Elephant Camp, on the way to Luang Prabang. It was set up by an elephant enthusiast called Vilaluck Vothivong who, with help from a German NGO, now looks after a herd of 17 elephants. It sits on 100 hectares of riverside forest. I may try to camp there. I also need to do some work on my bike. Front rack issues. And I’ve run out of chain oil. And my alan key can’t get enough purchase in the bolt that holds my rear brake cable in position. Work needs doing. But first, I think it’s time for a second croissant.
Love from me. X
Oh, by the way, in English we pronounce the country Laos as Laos, with the ‘s’ sound, just as we say Germany instead of Deutschland. But in Lao (the language), Laos is pronounced Lao. We say Laos (country), Lao (language) and Laotian (people), they say… I think… Lao, Lao and Lao. Oh, and lao in Lao means alcohol. So lao-Lao, a Laotian rice whisky, means alcohol of Laos. Language ♥︎
(A few pics below)
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Colleen’s a big believer in feelings
Colleen’s a big believer in feelings. She knows exactly
what it sounds like when her man, or one of her men,
goes down on one knee because she’s heard it three times.
Each time more momentous than the last, she hears
the soft collapse of carpet as it gives way under his weight,
the weight of man, of good men, devoted as pine.
This time she will say yes and everything will be different.
Her past, which aches to dissolve, will do just that,
will shimmer and fade like the blue wall of her love.
Darren performs the ritual, lands like the hull of a barge
before the wall –
he told her he wasn’t athletic, she breathed I hate athletic.
Hands shaped by cans of Carling clasp in prayer, trap
moisture from his breath.
He barely whispers the question for which they all came.
It hangs like gin in the air until she bites.
*
Morning comes. Colleen wants to make herself perfect,
a fiancée in control of her destiny. She stands before the opening
watched by stagehands, feeling more alone than she ever did in the pod.
Her fingers needle the dress she now regrets.
She wants to show off her shape in georgette or satin –
dress for the job she wants, not the one she has. The doors part
and Darren appears, wide-armed and practically jogging, perfect creases in his chinos.
She takes a step and cries uninterpretable tears.
Quicksilver pours from the tips of his fingers as he holds her,
grips her with military arms. She collapses into softness.
Reality is the iceberg of her love; a part of her dies.
This third man, the first to materialise – his smell is off, his hair too shiny.
Sad ironed and longing to break for a second, she recoils,
spins and retreats to the capsule to await her fourth.
Highlights: A unique carabao encounter in northwest Vietnam
I had a great deal to be grateful for today, and I wrote it all down. Well, some of it – there were things that happened after I’d put my pen away that made today a Very Special Day.
Firstly, the mountains west of Hanoi (I’m in Thanh Hoa district) are stunning, and provide the perfect counterpoint to help explain something I remember telling Laura while we were cycling in Georgia. I said the mountains in central Georgia – west of Tbilisi, east of Aspindza – are gorgeous because, or one of the remarkable things about them, is that they seem humble. They’re modest mountains: green-capped, unassuming; they roll gently, rise without erupting; and yet they’re easily 2,000m above sea level. They don’t jostle for attention but they’re beautiful. So, they’re humble, somehow. If you want to call them hills, fine. The descriptor still applies.
And if it sounds weird to hear mountains described as humble/modest then maybe the mountains (if you want to call them rock formations, fine) that dot Vietnam’s coastline, and form much of its western border region, make it make more sense. They absolutely erupt. In Ha Long Bay, Ninh Binh and on the way to Laos, they scream out for attention. They’re basically cliff faces, each one – vertical, some maybe even over-vertical. So showy, so ostentatious, so not humble. You’ve got to hand it to things that know the effect they have, and know how to work it. And yes, today I cycled through, around and among them a lot and it was wonderful.
Secondly, the cold, which had been sort of a pain in my ass while taking the air (meaning: resting for a day in Mai Chau because I didn’t sleep the night before because of the scheming rats nibbling bottles right by my head on the mattress on the floor, and the ache in my neck), made cycling all the better. It’s a useful skill, to flip the things that seem bad and turn them good. Cold weather cycling is a(n almost) sweat-free blast.
The cold onset of night was made to feel colder by the fact that the boiler in my hotel bathroom doesn’t boil. It gently warms, which would be a nice thing if it was called a gentlewarmer but it is not. Fortunately (this is Thing #3), while I was eating a bowl of phở at the local restaurant, two men at a nearby table invited me to sit with them and swiftly began plying me with ‘happy water’ – there’s a lot of this, in Vietnam – and talking as if I understood them. Then a local shopkeeper insisted on giving me far too many bananas. So, the cold can beat it.
Fourthly – finally – and most movingly, I saw something today that stopped me in my tracks, and goddamn near made me pass wind. It was an albino carabao. A white water buffalo. Which… I just Googled and apparently they’re not that rare. 3% of carabaos are albino. Wtf. Well I hadn’t seen one before today, so they’re rare to me, and it seemed sort of magical, a special thing. Its majesty left me speechless – not that I was mid-sentence – and when I stopped near it, it slowed its lumbering movements to a halt, turning its neck and stared right at me, only moving when someone rode past on a scooter. I took a couple of pictures, but it’s better if you imagine it, at least for now.
A white buffalo with a pink nose, piercingly light eyes, and, I was happy to see a few moments later, several other buffaloes to go galumphing with. I wondered if they saw the albino as being different from them. They didn’t seem to, but I couldn’t help it. They slipped by me into a clearing by the road to nibble some grass, and I rode off towards the border.
Evan
Evan came here to find love and that’s um,
basically that. A chance to date without
the weight of his physical insecurities.
This experiment allowed him to be judged for who he is as a person
(a program coordinator at a surrogacy agency, favourite band Morgan Wallen,
would-be father of two, meal of choice a well done steak)
rather than what he looks like, which is something
like a tapir, pink the shade of amaranth.
He’ll leave here with a wife, of that he’s sure,
someone who’ll be with him in the trenches.
He’s only used the Word with one person before
and that was Celia, his mother, who died
of complications relating to pulmonary hypertension,
almost without hearing him say it.
It was formative for Evan to lose the only woman in his life.
Over a period of seven, eight months he learned what it means to be vulnerable.
He brings the strength of weakness with him now,
wears it like a crown, won’t suffer blokes.
Can I be vulnerable with you? he asks,
to which Chastity responds with a single tear.
The elephant and the worm
Chastity is completely in love with Nick. They both
do pilates at the weekends, have blue eyes and know the SPF
of coconut oil. His love language is words of affirmation.
Nick knows sashimi, which Chastity finds sexy
because it shows that, if nothing else, he’s cultured.
Sophisticated, probably travelled. And anyway there’s plenty besides:
He says he’s a living breathing presence,
which makes her catch her breath because ever since
she went to Thailand she’s felt the exact same thing.
Time evaporates when bathing the heads of elephants, this she knows.
And when she and Nick first met, yes ma’am, well it’s a pleasure,
it was somehow the same.
He retained some ancient innocence.
Can I ask you a question? he asks, asking a question,
but her mind doesn’t rest on the details;
she’s whirling. She imagines them
kissing, giddy with tears and clumsy,
her underbite overridden by manic, sumptuous lust;
imagines her man on his knee, her outstretched hand,
the perfect diamond (how many carats? More’n a reindeer’s belly.)
and the swell of his conjugal proboscis.
It takes her by surprise, then, even with the benefit of the doubt,
when he asks, chiselling, if we were at a festival,
would you be able to sit on my shoulders?
She smiles but the truth slowly sinks, the wall collapses.
He should never have earned the descriptor, pachyderm.
Her skin thickens at the thought, much more a worm.
Update [23/01/2024]
Hi team.
It’s been some time since I wrote anything here, and naturally that means there’s too much to contain within one blogpost.
But know that I – and we – are still here, and still trucking on. Laura is giving her legs (and everything else!) a rest in Cambodia, and I am in a small Vietnamese town called Hoa Binh, pointed west. I will cross over to Laos in the next few days, and then pedal onwards to Luang Prabang. Then I’ll travel by bus to rejoin her, and hang out with our friend Adam, in Siem Reap. Adventures await, and yet, at the same time, they’re also happening right now!
So much for the geographical stuff. There are a couple of other things – projects! – I’d like to tell you all about, partly because sharing them (as they are) will help motivate me to continue pursuing them. Ideas don’t do well locked away.
The first one, actually, is proving quite easy to work on, as it has to do with our trip. We recently launched a website with the same name as our Instagram handle (@OnOurBicycles) – we’re branding, see. Its purpose is to communicate what we’ve learned, and what we’ll learn in the future, about cycling in different places, to an audience of other cyclists. For this reason, not much of it will be relevant or particularly interesting to people who follow me/us because they’re friends or family. However, if you’d like to look at the photos we’ve been taking along the way, and want a better way to view them than by going on Instagram (I understand!), then the Photo Gallery part of the website may appeal. Just click here to find it, and click on whichever country takes your fancy. We’re working our way through backlogs of photos, which is why there isn’t yet a Vietnam section, and why the Turkey/Georgia photos are raw and unedited.
The second is something I’m working on by myself. It’s more booky, long-form prosey, and at its root its about the long-overdue Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Except, it’s not really about that, is it? It’s about humans and society, and what the so-called ‘second coming’ means. The question that kicked it all off – and the sort of working title, although I’m steering away from it somewhat – was/is: If He came, would we believe Him? As in, what would it take for the actual (second) coming of God On Earth to convince us that he (/He/She/It) was legit? It would certainly take more than walking on water, because David Blaine (or was it Dynamo) already did that.
Or, conversely, assuming Jesus wasn’t actually the Son of God but was instead an excellent preacher who provided humanity with something it didn’t know it needed, what would a contemporary equivalent look like? One of Jesus’ key selling points was that he wanted to democratise the religious experience: bring it inside the home. Slaves made up a huge proportion of Roman society; Jesus said they were made in God’s image as much as the emperor. He offered his flesh and blood, and his devotees really dug it. In an age of multi-layered irony and social media addiction, a poststructural, post-climate change, anthropocene age, what message could we receive that would awaken us? Can any one person provide that? Where should we be looking?
Threads that tie into this whole shebang include Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key, which makes the (very convincing… possibly conclusive?) case that what really made Jesus’ stand out from all the other religious movements of the time was his way of democratising religious experience was by revealing the Eleusinian Mysteries to the masses: inviting everybody to God’s table by giving them wine spiked with psychoactive substances, allowing them to experience god at home, rather than by trekking to Eleusis. There is lots of juice here, but archaeo-chemistry (the scientific study of what people were eating and drinking during periods of ancient history) is a fledgling science – so young it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!
They (the threads) also include one woman’s claim, published recently in the Pentagon’s UFO files, that she had experienced an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’. As in, aliens abducted her and impregnated her. Her claim was included in statistical form in a cache of previously classified documents released (to The Sun) by the Pentagon in April 2022. Which is obviously nuts, right?
But you know, in his 1957 book Flying Saucers, Carl Jung explains that the way we interpret inexplicable phenomena has changed over time. For thousands of years, weird lights in the sky were messages written by the gods – astrology was the ‘science’ of deciphering these messages. Then for a while we called them ‘angels’, then they were evidence of fairies and pixies. Now we call them foreign military aircrafts, or aliens. No one believed the woman from the Pentagon files was really carrying the Son of Aliens. But you know who else had an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’, and who was (ultimately) believed? Mary! And all it took was a thumb up from Joseph. Well, no, it took a lot more than that, but the comparison says something, I think.
So anyway, that’s what’s ticking over on my end. It’s a work in progress. And I’d like to open up some sort of dialogue with it, which is why I’m considering starting a Substack dedicated to it, where I’ll post things as and when I write them. Serialise it, sort of. That way, if people are interested, they can read along. And if they have any recommendations for things to consider/read/watch/listen to, they can chip in. I’d love that, and it would undoubtedly help the work. You can probably subscribe to my existing Substack at this link in order to get future updates. But I’ll get round to setting that up properly in the coming weeks. Or months.
OH, and there’s another prose thing I’ve been mulling on, but which I won’t bore you with now.
So for now, thank you for checking in. Be good to each other. We love you.
Bru X
ONURBICYCLE 