Reading Signs - HK airport supplemental 6.24/25.8

The Hong Kong airport is very pretty It is open and bright despite the torrential rain outside gusting down in sheets on the arched glass.

There is a Burger King and a Ben and Jerry's. I see them and feel disgusted at what America exports. I wonder if it is possible not to export homogenized and homogenizing crap.

But then again I don't really know what I think.

An announcement says there are storm force winds outside. I'm experiencing a sort of fugue state because of lack of sleep and screaming babies.

I find it fascinating the skeins that connect us all. Worried that 8 hours in the Singapore airport might be less than ideal I ended up talking to a pretty Indonesian woman heading to Jakarta in the hopes that she might have an idea of what there was to do in Singapore for 8 hours. Aina told me she was going to try to be a vegetarian because of a condition that was causing arthritis and that she was going home after divorcing her husband of 6 years. I found it interesting that I had been talking to a man on the plane to SF about the causes of arthritis. Her brother who was traveling with her had gone to school in Valley Forge, a town nearby Philadelphia, where I am from originally. She was planning on moving to San Francisco at the beginning of next year.

It wasn't interesting because there was some kind of "love connection" or some shit, but because here I was halfway around the world and there are a million coincidences with some stranger after a 5 minute conversation. It reminds me of Drug Store Cowboy and Matt Dillion's advice to "read the signs" like the hat on the bed. But what are the signs, and what do they mean? When there is a meeting like that, there are signs; but it is as though I'm in a foreign country and I know the signs say something but I don't know what.

I'll bet we could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we just could read the signs.