Three Days in the Presidentials 
... tired and sated, I limped up the highway past them all, past the Land Rovers with NY plates and decaying pickup trucks, past sprawling mounds of mountain gear, past strutting undergrads and shaggy AMC vets, past the prone exhausted bodies of the hardcore, past 10 year old kids still hyper from their first and greatest grand adventure and past the posses of teenage kin. I limped past the father daughter pairs newly bonded, past unseeing lovers and aging fratboys recumbent on the lawn. I limped past silver haired ladies with character carved into the corners of their eyes, past those who’d turned forty and those who hadn’t, into the car and home ...
Tabulae
... we love pictures of up addicts, passed out in puddles of rancid piss and detritus. We love the beats and their stories of liquid nights and hot jazz and the liberty to run screaming across middle America with their middle fingers stuck high in the air. We love the guazey white diffusion that the romantics laid over reality. Coleridge and de Quincey and their self-absorbed crew draw deep sighs deep from the hearts of duty bound dads and heart broken undergrads alike. Kubla Khan, a pleasure dome ... if only ...
Lhasa was not Shangrila.
The capital city of Tibet was dirty and lacked sanitation; books and recreation were hard to come by; the diet was limited; medicine was more shamanistic than practical; and technology (even the wheel) was looked upon with suspicion. Even so, it was a city easy for the Western imagination to fall in love with; laughter was a constant; curiosity and pleasure were valued beyond industry; and inspite of a rigorous religiosity, the Tibetans were perhaps the least moralizing people of the modern era ...