THE 5:15 BUS

the oatmeal should be simmering in milk by 5:00 

Balong should be going to school by 6:15

and I should be hitting the trails at 6:30

but there are days for a 4-hour journey at 5:15

a cold listless bus ride to a meeting at 9:00

then back for the next day's labors at 8:00

it was Sunday when I hailed the bus at 5:15

flew to Bangkok where I landed at 17:50

Ubered to Chatrium and asleep at 19:15

4 FRAMES, 4 LINES

snake holes and the son who went away 
were the old man's story

we wore red and drank gin tonic 
in an impromptu Valentine's party

the aproned knight slew a dragon 
and made all the Chinese merry  

midnight black like Morticia Addams 
is both sensual and eerie

there's a fifth frame but the line on that 

will remain a mystery

SHOOTING CHURCHES (in Jakarta), EATING NOODLES (in Jakarta and Bangkok)

First I got tired of them noodles then ran out of old churches to frame, so I did random with my camera until that day in Jakarta, after the Big Bird got lost in the heavy rain that soaked the streets outside the Aryaduta.

The target was Monas and Immanuel Church was just accidental, built by the Lutherans of Batavia and one of the oldest christian churches in Indonesia, once a jewel of colonial Weltevreden District [now Central Jakarta) just across the imperial Koningsplein [now the square known as Merdeka]. 

The jackpot was the Gereja Cathedral Jakarta near MoFA, built from the residence of a General de Cock, dedicated to St. Mary of the Assumption and inaugurated by Edmundus Sybrandus Luypen who is a Jesuit monsignor, challenged [but not eclipsed] across the street by the huge Sunni Masjid Istiqlal.  

That is how I got back into shooting churches which of course is required to be paired with a bowl of noodles, curried yellow and chillied red as ordered by Wiwid, the night the "CSO BHR Caucus" dined with presidents.

We came to discourse on business and human rights, Art and Adi leading while I squeezed in a glimpse of barbed Monas and the Soviet-made Tugu Tani bronze amidst a sea of Grab motorbikes.  

L got lost and T kept talking on our last night in Jakarta, oxtail stewed in Bintang bridging the craft beer-marinated chips and chicken wings in Bangkok.

How do we solve the riddle of 2,043 billionaires wallowing on the fat of the land while 1.3 billion people almost have nothing to eat? Cargill reported a $2.8 billion net income in 2017 but did it actually helped the world thrive by paying the right taxes? Why should men get paid 20 percent more than women? 

The world definitely needs evening up and we need to even things up among ourselves to get the work going, like throwing out "engaged" and "focal" to get "one O" working, melding campaigns into programs to have just one pot cooking, and reinventing a sign-off process that usually gets us puking.  

I've been travelling to Bangkok so much that WAT-ching and Noodling Thailand has become boring stuff, Walking Bangkok and eating-anything-except-noodles is now the diamond polished from the rough, although sometimes I partake of Chatrium's breakfast noodle especially when I have the cough, that small bowl of batchoy greens and rice noodles and chicken balls that make me fart and laugh.   

ASIA-T[r]ICKED

Chang, Singha and Leo

in Chatrium there is a trio

free shuttles to Asiatique

boring Wednesday got me ticked

river prawns and fried scorpions

durian shake with roti to go 

shopkeepers in hide and seek

shoppers gawking at souvenirs

to Chao Phraya I retreat

had a Chang for a treat

what made Asitique tick

are the people that it tricked