Finally some words for these chords...
- -
Feels good to play guitar again. I did miss "her".:)

Cruising Through Phnom Penh...

See if you can figure this out. The streets of P.P. Makes the driving in TJ seem orderly and normal. And yet there is a joyous feeling of freedom when you are immersed in this craziness. I saw a stately, dignified woman of about 80 riding a bike of her own. A sporty red speedbike of some sort. Spine perfectly straight. In fact, all the women riding the bikes seemed so proud and dignified, perfect posture. Some with face masks. Look closely at these photos. The details are great. The woman has a child with her. The people of Cambodia ride 3, 4, 5? At a time on the bikes, btw.

They have a stoplight now, at least. Pnomh Penh.The hand in pic #1 belongs to "Ben", and I'm in the front seat with the camera. I did that with no other driver, btw.
I was loving the slice of Cambodian life. The drive though the country was a whole nother experience entirely. Even Ben laughed when we passed a truck with 30? People riding in a white toyota, including one on the hood.
Ben was great. He became a friend. Unfortunately he couldn't drive Siem Reap for us. But Tang did take us to the Wat that I will never forget.
The cab drivers of Asia, damn...

Because I have such body issues...

I just now took these. I am holding a broom to push the button to take the pics. I'm so self-conscious and feel so fat in the previous pics. I already feel fat all the time, anyway.
And it's not even that I care if people are fat or not. In fact, I hate how mean people are about overweight people on TV and other places. And how focused and obsessed I and others are about it. I am dieting right now- as usual, actually.Yeah, I'm fat. I have no illusions. At least it's mostly in the right places. I don't care if others weigh 500 pounds. It's me that I care about being fat. But I do need to stop being so self-conscious about it.
I purposely put my kimono blouse on because it's in my current profile pic. But also, off-topic, there is a strange pink or reddish light that showed up in this shot near my face...wonder if it will translate in the transfer...*note: Hmm. It did transfer. What the hell is that?
*note 2* In most ways I am brave in life. Hell, I'm so brave it's stupid. I know this. :)
But this was the holdout. My one area of fear. Now you finally know what's below the neck/shoulders. So now I don't care and it's nice. No more fear. lol

Full Metal Jacket...

This figuratively is one. This jacket felt like it weighed about 50 pounds. I think it's entirely made of lead, felt like it anyway. I also have a cummerbund-type thing under my blouse, only it holds my passport and money and stuff. I don't think I'd have trouble with pick pockets or cut-throats while holding this, though.

Drove down an anonymous dirt road out of Phnom Penh to a rural Army base where they don't pay the soldiers so well and they are always looking for a way to make a few extra dollars. I mentioned previously that one can pay for the priviledge of throwing hand grenades and stuff....

In fact,,,,, if you wanted to,,,, and I didn't,,, but if you did,,,, you could blow up a cow with a Chinese made rocket propelled grenade/"RPG". The kind you always see terrorists running around with. Of course you have to pay for the cow AND the missle. Don't feel bad for the cow. It's all over quickly for the cow and Cambodians certainly won't let perfectly good meat go to waste. They say if someone does pay up for the whole cow/missle 'expirence', the soldiers will hold a barbecue in your honor and you can have a big party with the troops, and you actually would be feeding a lot of people.

The weapons are all leftover, I think. Making money from a negative.
Tourists obviously will and do pay for the ability to play with the big guns for a bit. Anyone want to shoot an anti-aircraft cannon?? Got $$$$$$?? Well if so, you can!!!!! (not at real aircraft though......... well.. how much $$$ do you have? ;-)

WOO HOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

The Temple That I Will Never Forget...

When we were driving through the area of Seim Reap, we passed many temples, or Wats.
The driver was a younger kid, and we were amusing each other by trying to learn different words in both Cambodian and English. So we pass this one section of jungle,
and he points and says " You go back theh, you see something you nevah gonna foget."

Later, I kept trying unsuccessfully to get back there. Turned out S hadn't heard the driver say those words, missed the whole thing.When I mentioned it, he quickly got us there.
What we saw took my breath away. It was down a trail, deep into the jungle. The temperature suddenly dropped about 10, 20 degrees. It was glorious for that alone. And if Ley lines exist, surely this place is a magic place, along Ley lines. Everything glowed green. It was a temple, a huge temple complex, only older and ...untouched, undiscovered until very recently. It was all as it had been for hundreds, a thousand years. Only it was as if an earthquake had toppled everything. A head sat a few feet away from a statue body. There was moss growing over all of it. Oddly, it reminded me of a scene from Logan's run.
There were giant, ropy, entwined trees everywhere that were merging with the temples,
the ruins.
I honestly didn't cry as much as it sounds like I did. I cried a couple of times. The killing Fields, and this place. This place made me cry with happiness. A feeling of joy and an awareness that I was truly glad to be alive. And I feel so inadequate with my words when trying to describe all of this.
Other thing: The sweet faces and bodies of some of the Asparas,
the dancing girls that adorn so many of the temples. They were all so different,I believe they were real women at one time. They had to be. Surely the artists that carved them had to have loved them. The detail and ability to capture the personalities in the faces! An Aspara that looked like she must've loved to laugh, an Aspara that might have been beautiful but wicked. Maybe that was just my imagination.
But I don't think so. The art was that amazing.
We kept having camera problems. :( It was so odd, we would fix the problems, and then a new camera problem would arise. I didn't get many pics as I'd wanted.
One pic

More...

These are a couple of more upsetting photos. I didn't take a lot of pics because I felt like it might be sensationalistic, exploitative to do so. I'm talking about the bones in the ground and all the clothing. The signs describing in vivid detail what happened. The trenches dug by the nude prisoners before they were killed. Their bleached, weathered bones were literally sticking out of the ground in the trenches that they'd dug. There are so many graphic and horrible things I could have captured on film. Didn't the Nazis make the prisoners dig the trenches first, too?
I'm not going to try and play like I'm so tough- I was weeping like a baby stumbling around looking at those little details that mean so much. A button I saw that I will never forget. It made me think of the little kids, naked little kids, their clothes-
That shit was real, it wasn't placed there out of some staged set. There were skulls with cracks in them from rifle butts bashing them in. Small skulls, big skulls. It literally was like seeing Auschwitz with the bodies and everything still there. Yes the skulls were all placed in a tower. But there were bones and clothing of all sizes everywhere that stayed where the people had originally landed when killed. It is becoming part of nature, at least. The earth is growing over it.
As I wrote in a previous post, there were butterflies and beauty there. Trees, blowing grasses.
Forgive my spew of this. Hopefully I can let this go now. Obviously that was something that affected me so deeply, it will remain with me forever.
*Warning* May be too disturbing for some viewers.

Far Off Places...

I was trying to remember all the places we went, and it's a blur. Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan. I drank and talked with bar girls in Bangkok ( that's as far as that went, lol), wandered the Killing Fields, climbed the various Wats(temples)in the jungles of Cambodia.
Ate happy pizza. Don't know if anyone knows what happy pizza is. It makes you happy.;)
There's also footage of me in bulletproof military fatigues firing a machine gun. If you have enough money you can blow up cows with rocket launchers. But of course you must buy the cow.:)
I did not kill any cows.
The point is, I'm so happy that I grabbed the gusto! I lived! I'm so grateful that I had these experiences! I rode on the back of a motorcycle at night through the streets of Phnom Penh, danced at clubs. Swam in the ocean in Bali.

I never would have foreseen this in my future, many years ago when I was contemplating suicide.I need to remember this stuff when I get really profoundly depressed. Things change and I don't know what's around the corner. And it can be wonders beyond my wildest dreams! I know that meeting you all
has been a happy change in my life.
let's see if these work

Let's see if this works...
* I took this footage with a camera. Muay Thai boxing match in Thailand*

The Killing Fields...

The Killing Fields were places where men, women, and children were taken and executed.
The fields were deceptively peaceful and lovely. Tall grasses, trees blowing in the wind. Butterflies.
I was completely ignorant of what I was going to see. I knew nothing of what happened there. Thanks to the extensive documentation by the Khmer Rouge, I found out.

Bones. Skulls. A tower of skulls. Trails littered with torn, tattered, ancient clothes. The clothing of children that had been stripped from them before they were killed. I remember looking down at a button and a piece of green fabric that had clearly once been a dress. It was next to a trench that was filled with the partially buried bones of women and children. On the tree next to the trench it explained what had happened in vivid detail. We'd almost been walking on them.
It was one of the most profound and disturbing things I have ever experienced. It's only now that I am able to even talk about it a little. The field is littered with bones and the clothing and and the trenches that they fell in and it's a graveyard for the evil of humankind.

Fatigued...

I wound up sleeping forever. I'm only now starting to feel a little more solid again.
I lost my glasses! Expensive ones that aren't so easy to replace. I lost them in Cambodia.
Last night I viewed my pics and was shocked by how few there were! I really thought I'd
taken more!
Sorry for a short blog- I'm still wiped out. :)

I'm Back...

My hours are all screwed up, mass jet laggery! Spent a lot of time on planes of all kinds. Cambodia captured my attention the most.
The Killing Fields. I never thought I'd see in my life some of the things I saw there.
I think I should write that seperately with a warning for content.I don't want to spring that on someone unawares. Let's put it this way: S and I saw a dead biker guy on the 101 freeway going to LAX before flying out to asia. They were doing chest compressions on the obvious corpse. That was nothing compared to what we saw in the fields of Phnom Penh.

And now for a shallow change of subject: Got a cute purse and sandal set. Climbed to the top of Anghkor Wat. A cute hat.
I love you all and I want you to remember how fleeting life is. I need to remember this myself.
Iprofoundly affected.

Cambodia...

Made it to Cambodia. Didn't make it to Angkor Wat today.
Even though we didn't make it there, we managed to see a lot today. And even if we didn't see anything but that one thing, that one thing had a profound impact on me. Even at this moment it's hard to write about. I'll have to come back to this. I do want to come back to it, though.

We went to see the killing fields today. Rather, The Killing Fields. Deserves caps.
It wasn't like we had planned to go there. A sweet-faced Cambodian friend of "S" recommended it. Oh boy. As S later said, his friend "B" lived through it, being our age. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge.
It's one thing to hear about it on TV or read brief articles in National Geographic.
Made especially worse by the fact that I was completely ignorant of what I was going to see. I literally thought it was going to be a field, with maybe some sort of marble slab commemoration.

I was wrong, very wrong. Was not at all prepared for what I saw.
Again, this is hard to write about, and I don't have time right now to do it justice.
Hope everyone is well. I'll write more when I can. xoxoxo