What Does Your Soul Look Like?

4:00 PM Tuesday, January 18, 2000

I'll run out of battery before Bombay. It's hotter than hell here in Singapore. DJ Shadow is asking me, "What Does Your Soul Look Like?" It's turning brown. So is everybody else I'm traveling with. This is the part of the plane ride where I stop stressing and start enjoying myself. This is the transition. Southeast Asia. Yo, Shadow is sooo global. He works wherever. Like the stars in the sky. Shit, I have to get on the plane. Ok. Bye.

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(Later, that same battery charge….)

Alaska is the next place I want to go to. The woman I sat next to on the way to Chennai was from a little place near Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage sounds like a good place to anchor yourself to. She said, "Go to Alaska last. It will ruin you for the rest of the planet". She's 70 and about 2 hours from landing for her first time in India. She confesses that she doesn't know much about it. While 5 or 6 Indian people eavesdrop, I explain their culture. I'm unable to explain the devastatingly bad Hindi movie being projected, however.

She's on an immunization trip with her rotary club. Kind of like a chemical missionary. She's clueless of course, and cold-blooded as a polar bear, but I have no fear for her. She is from Alaska. I told her I thought she'd do just fine. She said, "Why do you say that?" And I said, "Cause you folks are so laid back and used to dealing with shit that you can probably go anywhere." She agreed and then offered this: "Yeah, not like those pathetic, uptight Midwesterners..."

Even though my MOTHER was a Midwesterner, I let her go. I mean, she was kinda like my mother anyhow. I even started to think about her in a motherly sort of way, thinking that I might confess that I'd just lost mine. I'm always randomly adopting mothers. They're good things to have and yours doesn't need to be gone to appreciate that.

I'll write again when I'm on the Alternating Current.


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