Nam got my computer working again, now with two extra fans and a new case. It’s not noisier than it was before, but then it’s always been pretty loud. It did shut down and restart on its own this afternoon while I was capturing footage, but hopefully that won’t be a common occurance. Knock on wood.

The Muddy Basin Ramblers are back! We did a gig at our ancestral home of Peshawar on Saturday night and it rocked. No advertising, so the place wasn’t as packed as usual, but it was a full house nonetheless. The owner cautioned us about being too loud, and we only got in a couple of sets, but the stuff we were able to do was good. I was afraid we were rusty after so long a hiatus, but it turns out we were just getting antsy. I got asked a lot about the washtub bass, as usual, and one guy, a real bassist, even tried to play it. It’s hard, though, and I get a kick out of watching other people play the thing. David can, and Dana could when she was here, but everyone else does little more than a general thumping. We didn’t mic it this time, so in order to hear it I was bearing down pretty hard. So hard, in fact, that I wore through half a mic stand and almost a whole ballpoint pen. I’m going to have to get a titanium pic or something for nights like those.

We were halfway through a song when a huge cockroach ran towards me. Without stopping or (hopefully) missing notes, I stomped on it and spent the rest of the song wondering if it was stuck to the bottom of my duck shoes. Turned out it was. Ew.

That’s ok, though, as I’m not a prominent member of the band. Sandman had women calling out that they wanted him to father their babies, underwear is frequently thrown at the likes of Conor and Slim, David is simply too cute for many people, and Thumper, well, Thumper wears sequins, and besides, he’s married. But I stay in the back for the most part and play my tub and the horns without too much attention, so the whole roach thing wasn’t that big a deal.

We stayed until about 2 or 3 before catching cabs back to Bitan, where Sandman and Slim were accosted by a pack of dogs in front of 7-Eleven. Adoring fans, no doubt.

The other night after I got home, turned on my lights, turned on my computer and settled down to make some dinner, I noticed that my computer wasn’t doing anything. Oh, it was whirring and buzzing and blinking, but it wasn’t actually doing anything, like starting up.

Worrying that I might have blown my hard drive (sounds like a geek pr0n flick, don’t it?), the next day I called up Namic, a friend of Maoman’s, who does computer repair house calls. I hate having to unplug everything and haul my big silver box to Guanghua to find out what’s wrong with it.

Nam said he’d come over that night to take a look. He’s a Canadian of Azerbaijani descent who looks and acts much like the techie character Marshall on Alias, which I found immensely reassuring. Turns out I’ve blown my Asus motherboard; the drives are fine. Whew. It also turns out I need a lot more fans to keep other things from burning out, which means a new casing as well.

So I’ve been computer-less for the past couple of days at home. It’s been strange, a forced return to the pre-Internet age for me. I’ve cleaned up a bit and watched a lot of Firefly episodes (damn, that’s a good show, even if the Chinese is a bit much), but it’s odd to not always be online. Makes me wonder what all I did back then.

The weather broke yesterday as well. Our long streak of flawless atmospheric conditions and ideal light failed, and now we’re under the thumb of a tropical storm pulling across the Philippines. Had to happen sooner or later, I guess. Last night I hung out on the suspension bridge with neighbors Greg and Chris, among others. It was pleasant; I can see why so many folks around there do it; it’s fun to sit and chat, enjoying the breeze and the scenery. Just take care that you don’t drop anything that can roll off the bridge into the river below.

Nam brough my computer back last night but it wasn’t quite right, so he took it off again. We’ll try it again tonight. I’ve nearly filled my camera’s 1gb of memory with RAW-format pictures I want to download and get onto Flickr, and I feel out of touch if I can’t google any damn fool notion that comes into my head at any given moment.

The weather’s been stunningly clear all week. The light is gorgeous and every day, just before the sun sets, the city ripe for gigabytes worth of amazing photography. Ordinary bland scenes and locations are sidelit with golden rays at just the right angle, and the light scatters around, bouncing off every shiny object and creating unique shadows. As fall is my favorite season, the time just before dusk is my favorite time of day.

And every day at this time I am in my little office, looking out the window occasionally, watching the photos pop up on Flickr, photos taken by people less occupied than I am, apparently, or who have the will to take off from work to take advantage of the light. Sometimes I bring my camera with me, in the vague hope that I’ll get everything done in record time and be out the door before sunset, but it hasn’t happened yet. Most days I don’t bring my big camera, relying on my little one if I happen to come across a good shot. But usually all I have when I get on the subway home in the dark is a headache from staring at the computer screen too intensely, trying to get everything all done. But it’s a new system and it always takes longer than expected to finish.

It’s not helping, or maybe it is, that I’m reading another travel book by Paul Theroux, the one about his journey among the various islands of the Pacific Ocean. I read these books in place of actual travel, tied down as I am at the moment (the moment! Who am I kidding? “tied down for these few years” is more like it) with the film I’m working on. I read Theroux, or Bryson, or some other travel writer to get my fix, but it’s like substituting Internet pr0n for actual sex; you can get by on it, but it doesn’t really satisfy. But it’s what I can do now, so it’s what I do. I carry a book in my backpack to read on the subway, if I can find a seat at rush hour, which isn’t terribly likely. The names of the various stations, the announcements concerning where to get off for that and that line, have become annoyingly, terribly familiar. I plug my ears with earphones even though my iRiver is silent, just to block out what seems like a song stuck on repeat.

One night recently, on my way into the subway, a girl walking by asked me to do translation for her. Out of the blue, she just held up a report in English and said, “Will you translate this for me?” Needless to say, her cute smile and efforts to look 14 when she was clearly in her 20s didn’t exactly bowl me over as she was expecting. I thought of making a big deal of it, but I was too tired and disappointed at the days’ lack of good pictures.

“I’m not a translator,” I said, and started to walk away.

“But it’s just a short report!” she called out after me. I kept walking, my head filled with weather reports.

At the last moment, the typhoon that was threatening to hit us head-on turned north, just brushing past us. I think people are getting a bit jaded about typhoons after so many have visited us this year. Sandy called me up on Saturday night and invited me to a jam. I assumed it was at his house, but he said a whole bunch of people wanted to go huddle on the stands overlooking the small exercise park near me, supposedly to “experience” the typhoon. We ended up compromising by going to the substantially larger basketball courts nearby instead. Although the courts are covered, the only walls consist of trees planted around the edge and some chain-link fence. Sandy, Will, Tim, Brent and I were the first to arrive, but people kept showing up with more instruments and drinks, and pretty soon we had a fair little party going on. The rain was streaming down over the sides of the tin roof, and every so often a gust of wind would blow the rain at us, but it didn’t really bother anyone.

The sky was lightening at about 5am when Sandy, Tim and I decided to surrender the courts to the early-morning joggers. Besides, I had to get up for filming a few hours later.

The Muddy Basin Ramblers are gearing up again. We’ve got a handful of performances scheduled, and we decided to rehearse down by the river last weekend. It started out as a rehearsal, but after a short time we’d attracted quite a large crowd. David was facing away from most of our audience and didn’t realize they were there for quite a while. One of the listeners had brought and insane dog. It was one of those dogs women carry around in their purse and make you wonder if they (the dogs) really have legs or are they the dog version of paraplegics and have to be kept in purses. No wonder it lost its tiny mind. It barked and ran around as if dodging imaginary meteorites, its eyes rolled back in its little head.

In any case, we’re looking forward to doing another riverside…rehearsal? performance? Whatever. I personally think we should rent one of the larger boats and take our act on the water. Sound really carries over water, and we wouldn’t have to worry about psychotic canines.

It was nice a cool, breezy and wonderful before the typhoon. Now mid-summer is back with all of its muggy heat and still air, constant air-conditioning and longing glances at any body of water in sight. Perhaps it was some kind of opposite indian summer thing, a foray of winter into summer’s traditional territory as indian summer is summer’s way to inserting its influence far away from home base.

Back on November 18th, 2003, I wrote about my experiences (scroll down to the date) with Lonely Planet’s Globetrekker program when they came to Taiwan to do a show. Although I don’t have cable, I’ve heard that the show’s been aired, finally. Or it could be a rerun. It would seem, unsurprisingly, that the producers’ claims of being tired and not wanting to do that segment were bullshit; they just wanted to use an attractive local girl instead. I wonder if they got her to spout political slogans as well; it seemed to be one of the requirements for the spot. Then again, I don’t have her figure.

The weather these days is gorgeous, cool and breezy and a nice alternative to the constantly jarring mix of energy-sapping heat and bone-chilling air conditioning that defines mid-summer here. Yet another typhoon, however, seems to be on its way to ruin the weekend, timed just so that we don’t get any more days off work.

I was over at the neighborhood temple the other day talking with one of the caretakers about the curious mix of religions in Taiwan. In China and other places, Buddhism and Taoism are kept seperate, although you can go to either to worship. Taiwan was originally like that as well, with mainly Taoist temples. When the Japanese took over in 1895, however, the Taoist temples had to choose between converting to the more acceptable Buddhist gods or being closed. Most chose the former, and the old Taoist gods were stuffed in a closet somewhere away from official Japanese view.

In 1945, when the Japanese left and the island was returned to Chinese rule, the old gods were taken out and returned to the alter. Problem was, people had been worshipping Buddhist gods for decades and had kind of taken a shine to them, so they left them up to share the alters, and so the temples became the odd mishmash of religions that they are today.

The caretaker, a guy named Xie, also runs a Chinese medicine shop over by the suspension bridge; sometimes I stop in an chat. He says there are two kinds of qi-gong (a kind of energy-management system for the body; “the Force” from the Star Wars movies is the closet analogy I can think of at the moment), hard and soft. The hard style takes many years to perfect and cultivates energy within the body in a closed system through various exercises, while the soft style is easier as in its view the body is open to the energy flowing through every living thing in the environment, thus making cultivation simply a matter of gathering energy from any available source in the vicinity. It’s quite interesting; I should get my sword teacher’s take on it. I suspect the hard-style proponents see the soft style as a cop-out, sort of like “real” photographers scoff at such things as Photoshop.