So, how did I end up in that hotel room in Hong Kong?
Nepal 2: HKG
Author: Daniel
Nepal 1: A Hotel Room in Hong Kong
This is essentially a book-length travel memoir which I’ll be feeding out over the course of the next year (sign up for email updates when a new chapter is posted). Working title is “In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness” but it’ll probably change. Everything in here is true. A few minor details may be changed in order to accommodate the fallibility of memory, protect identities, or improve narrative flow, but that’s all. It’s a pretty good story with a solid emotional core. I hope you get something out of it.
In Praise of Character in the Bleak Inhuman Loneliness
journeys in Nepal
This is one of those stories with no clear beginning, and no clean end. But it begins, best I can tell it, in a hotel room in Hong Kong. 3:30 A.M.
Black Men in America, Terror in Iraq, and the Problem of Places Where Things “Simply Happen.”
I had the privilege of finding myself in Seattle this last weekend, visiting a friend who works as an Aerospace Engineer for Boeing. He sits in an office all day, working on wiring diagrams for one specific system on the new 787 Dreamliners. He is a U.S. citizen: white, upper-middle class, as am I.
On the 4th of July, we found ourselves in an Uber, heading to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Our driver, Fritz, spoke with a heavy accent— my best guess puts it at Ghanaian, but my best guess is only so informed.
He was listening to BBC World on the radio, and we got to talking about the media. The day before there had been a massive terror attack in Baghdad, Iraq. Over 200 people had been killed. Some of you probably heard about that one. One of my friends even changed her profile picture. But how many of you changed your profile picture for Bangladesh? How many of you are wondering, right now, “where the hell IS Bangladesh?” (It’s by India).
Twenty people were killed in an attack on a restaurant in the capital, Dhaka, right before the Baghdad attack. That’s more victims than there were at San Bernardino. Both attacks, in Iraq and Bangladesh, occurred during Ramadan, Islam’s holy month. Most victims were Muslims.
That’s like Christian extremists launching an attack on Rome, during Christmas.
AND YET
No one cares.
Why?
This book will fill the “Game of Thrones” sized hole in your life
With the stunning conclusion to season six of Game of Thrones, an embarrassingly large number of us are now left with nothing to look forward to every Sunday night.
Now that the series has finally, totally and truly eclipsed George R. R. Martin’s books, you can’t even fill the 10-month gap between seasons by reading those. Well, you could, but trust me: at this point, it’s better just to stick with the show. Books 4 and 5 weren’t all that good, and the wait for 6 will just make you angrier than you need to be, really.
Instead, pick up a copy of Patrick Rothfuss’ 2007 novel, “The Name of the Wind.”
Book Review: Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer
“Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains” was first published in 1990. Well before the cultural zeitgeist embraced the outdoors as the hippest, healthiest place to play, and long before #adventure became chic, Krakauer began his book with this epigraph:
“Having an adventure shows that someone is incompetent, that something has gone wrong. An adventure is interesting enough in retrospect, especially to the person who didn’t have it; at the time it happens it usually constitutes an exceedingly disagreeable experience.”
There’s something to be said here about the wisdom of your elders, but considering the name of this website, I’ll leave it hanging.
A collection of climbing and mountaineering essays and articles written for Outside Magazine and others, “Eiger Dreams” was the first book ever released by author Jon Krakauer, who would later go on to find literary fame with two heavy hitters: “Into The Wild” and “Into Thin Air.” By nature of being an essay collection, “Eiger Dreams” doesn’t demonstrate the thematic and narrative tightness of those later books; some essays are worth reading, others will likely have you skipping ahead to see how much longer until the next one.
thisisyouth 