Joshua Samuel Brown's Blog

Taking the long view during times of crisis is a luxury, but seeing as it’s my birthday (or was when I started this essay) I’m allowing myself the indulgence. 
Follow along as you please - I recognize that attention is currency these days.

I’ve been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. The book has offered me a perspective I haven’t had before on time, which is natural given the circumstances.

I’ll leave it to you to fill in the circumstances with whatever catastrophe - impending or in progress - however you like. 

I’m midway through the book, and the author is talking about the conquest of North and South America by Europeans. It’s a subject I’ve read a great deal about, but until reading this chapter I hadn’t really put the time frame into perspective. 

Without getting too far into the weeds, in 1492, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue... 

Which, admittedly, leaves a lot to be desired insofar as what befell the people living in the continents unfortunate enough to be on the other end of Columbus' voyage in the centuries to follow.

But let's shrink the time frame down a bit.

There’s no childish doggerel (at least not as I’ve heard) neatly describing the destruction of the Aztec Empire, but according to Google AI that occurred on August 13, 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés captured the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán.

There are plenty of books out there about the decades between these two events, and well more about the centuries that followed. (Feel free to ask for recommendations, or to recommend some yourself.)

But on the occasion of my 56th birthday, I find myself meditating on this particular span of time, personalizing it by moving it 500 years forward into a recognizable time frame. 

So 1492 = 1992 - And so forth.

In 1992 I was living in Rochester, NY, and had more-or-less just begun my post-university life of travel and various jobs. I moved to Taiwan in 1994, lived there until 1998 until I became fluent enough in Mandarin to pass myself off professionally as Mandarin Fluent, which led to my first professional job in which speaking Chinese was a main component. 

I travelled around China for a couple more years at that job, was back in the USA for Y2K, then returned to Asia for an extended period as a footloose and fancy free freelance travel journalist until 2006, when I published my first book (Vignettes of Taiwan). 

This led to my first gig with Lonely Planet, and I travelled around on various projects for LP until 2013. In 2013 I relocated to Portland and became an Oregonian, and had another career shift, from travel writing to being a tour guide. 

By August 13, 2021, I’d already published a few more books, had partnered up for good after many near-misses, had shifted careers yet again, and settled down in the town where I’ll probably spend the rest of my life after decades of travel.

So much for the condensed version of my own life over 29 years (with an additional four years added on to bring us past the 500 year anniversary of the destruction an of indigenous empire that had ruled Mesoamerica for 200 years before being laid low by a combination of germs, steel and avarice). 

My point in this essay (besides the book recommendation) is to humanize time. 

History feels academic, and the years between 1492 and 1525 are difficult to grasp in the human scale of things.  But I can contextualize the decades between 1992 and 2025, personally and politically. 

Without getting too deep into the woods, as a 23 year old in 1992 things seemed to be generally looking up from my own limited perspective. The USSR had just collapsed, the world seemed to be liberalizing in general, and the term climate change had no more relevance to me than whatever the Aztec phrase for malodorous armored men from another world would have had to a 23-year old living in Tenochtitlán.

I don’t know much about the general mindset of Aztec people, but I’m going to assume that opinions must have varied about as much as they do among my own culture / circle of friends. 

By 43 my historical counterpart from Tenochtitlán might have travelled around his world, visiting other cities in the kingdom, maybe hearing tales about malodorous armored men from another world who’d begun appearing in lands far to the east. 

The analogy gets hazy from here on in, mostly because of how exponentially faster information (along with everything else) moves in the 21st century than it did in the 16th.

But regardless, no matter what opinion (or lack thereof) my historical counterpart from Tenochtitlán had of Spaniards on his 43rd birthday, by his 56th - if he’d managed to survive - his world had been altered beyond recognition.  

By that point, his opinion had become as irrelevant to history as my own.

But the earth keeps spinning, and at this point that may be the best we can hope for. 

Thanks for reading. Leave a comment if you like.

 

(Above - ingredients used in Former Travel Writer Fried Rice Recipe with meat and vegetables: Not shown: Rice, Meat, Vegetables.)

OK, not so much a recipe as a rough guide.  And since all internet recipes need to have a story beforehand, here's mine:
Where Asian food is concerned, my post-Taiwan / post Lonely Planet life has been a series of culinary disappointments. Chinese restaurants in Eastern Oregon are mediocre at best, so I make my own Asian food at home.
So much for the story. OK, method:
1) Make the rice the day before. I use basmati or a medium grain. Use half of it for some other dish, save the other half in the fridge. Let the earth turn a bit. (Freshly made hot rice makes goopy stir fried rice.)
2) Now its another day. Congratulate yourself on having reached this milestone.  Heat up sesame oil in wok and chuck in some garlic, chopped onion, maybe some ginger. Let food be your medicine. Stir fry until onion is translucent. Pull it all out of the wok.
3) Putting in meat? Or shrimp? Whoops. I forgot to mention that you should have sliced up some of these things earlier. GO BACK AND HAVE DONE THAT! Now put it in the wok and cook it for a reasonable time. And as long as you're violating the rules of space time already, take that meat (chicken? beef? I also use pork belly, but that I cook fully in the deep air fryer because deep air fryer pork belly is the shit) and marinate it in a mixture of ingredients shown in picture above. 
You want specifics? I used some rice wine, oyster sauce, soy sauce, a bit of Braggs amino stuff. Make it rain flavor. Now, put that shit in and stir fry it up. Chicken? Make sure its almost close to being fully cooked before going to the next step. Beef? Not so long. Tofu? Tempeh? Why are you wasting my time? 
(JK...I've used both. Firm tofu works best. If you freeze it before hand it'll be even firmer. Learned that trick in college before I could even find Singapore on a map. But I digress. Where were we?)
4) Remember the onion / garlic / ginger mix from step two? Did you already compost it? Did I suggest that? No. THROW IT BACK IN WITH THE MEAT/TEMPEH/ETC.
5) If you didn't use anything for your protein, you can totally skip item three. Should have said that earlier. Also, you could have skipped the last sentence of step two. My bad.
6) Put some more sesame oil into the wok at this point and then throw your chopped veggies (sure, use frozen niblets. Seriously, you think that little street stall you remember loving so much from that one neighborhood in Taipei you can't seem to find on a map uses fresh vegetables? How close to Carrefour or Costco were they? Nobody has time for that...It's the SPICES you remember, B - that, and the swiftly fading memories of a carefree youth spent like the protagonist of some Rudyard Kipling story. THOSE DAYS ARE GONE. DEAL WITH IT.)
Sorry, still on six. Anyway, toss the veggies, protein etc., around and now add the rice and STIR FRY IT. Add more spices! Got rice wine? Chuck some in. Red wine? Chuck that in as well. Sure, why not? The goal is to have it be moist but not have the rice all goopy. 
7) Maybe put the lid on and let it steam cook for a minute or two. Any wine left? Drink it. Let the spirits awaken momentarily the warm nostalgia  of days of youth that will never return. Dream of flying to a strange city in search of foods untasted. Accept the transitory nature of experience. Why do you think I dragged you to Vipassana? Stop feeling sorry for yourself, oh former international man of mystery. You travelled the globe for 20 years eating the best food on the planet and got paid for it and now those days are gone. You are a middle-aged homeowner making your own fried rice. You have a garden. BE HAPPY FOR FUCK'S SAKE!
8) Invite friends over to share your bounty. They will tell you it's the best fried rice they've ever eaten. Accept their compliments even though in your heart of hearts you know they don't know any better. Only Anthony Bourdain understands you, and look where that got him.  There's a lesson in this if you care to look, but...why bother?  
9) Refrigerate unused portions. 

(This was fucking delicious. How I long for the road....)
 


 

In the spring of 2000 I was rollerblading down Castro street, zig-zagging to slow myself down before hitting Market street when I noticed a guy with a messenger bag locking his bike in front of a movie theater. I recognized instantly the fluid motion of a fellow bike messenger. I then noticed that his messenger bag had the Globe Canvas logo and not that of Tumbuk2, the messenger bags used by bay area couriers. 

It took about ten seconds for me to recognize that the man was my old friend Joe Hurley, who I’d written off as dead a few years before (for very compelling reasons that I won’t get into here).

 Joe Hurley?

 He turned and looked at me.

JOSH BROWN! GOD BLESS YOU! JOSH BROWN!

It was my indeed my old friend, alive and well, having gone through a spiritual experience that saved his life, bringing him from NY to California in the process.   

Joseph Hurley and I first met in the mid eighties, when we were both messengers for Lightspeed Couriers, remaining friends throughout my university years upstate and beyond. Until that moment in San Francisco we’d last spoken in 1994, when I’d worked briefly for the messenger company he’d started in NYC before heading off to Taiwan. 

At some point shortly thereafter the company closed down, and Hurley disappeared, with mutual friends telling me different sides of a story ending with Joe’s ditching NYC for pastures less likely to bring about his premature demise.

Having looked for him a few times in the late nineties with no success, I assumed - along with more than one mutual acquaintance - that he was dead. Finding out that he was not merely alive, but alive and well, made me extremely happy.

I am equally saddened now to learn of his death from Covid - and more than a little ashamed to have learned of his passing nearly three years after the fact.

Joe and I hung out often over the next year in San Francisco. When my dot.com job ended in the summer of 2001, I moved on, eventually heading back to Asia. Joe moved back east not too long after, and though it would be another 18 years before we lived in the same time zone, we still kept in contact sporadically, and would meet each other for meals whenever I was back in New York. More than once, Joe was the last friend I hung out with before heading back to Asia. We'd meet up, and he'd take me out for a three hour meal at a Queens diner before dropping me off at JFK to catch a red-eye flight back to Hong Kong or Taipei.

 We fell out of contact a couple of times during this period, both times following heated political arguments. Joe was politically conservative - and here I should interject that his was a traditional Reagan / Goldwater conservatism rather than the current MAGA strain. His positions were well thought out, and he expected the same of anyone with whom he engaged in political discourse.

Which, at far as I knew, was anybody he thought was intelligent enough to keep up with him. 

Conversations with Hurley generally turned to politics, and as he an I held opposite opinions on many (but not all) subjects, these often became debates, which sometimes became arguments. 

My general strategy to end an unwanted debate is to say something obviously foolish, and Joe…well, Joe Hurley did not suffer fools lightly. 

But we’d generally reconnected after a year or two’s radio silence, with one of us reaching out to the other over email or social media.

The last time we reconnected was in 2019. A mutual friend had run into him and told me he was doing well. I reached out over LinkedIn and discovered that he’d made a career shift to teaching following an incredibly impressive return to the academic world. We wound up talking regularly over the next few months, and had plans to reconnect in person that didn’t happen, mostly for logistical reasons.  

We continued talking after I moved back west, though less often because of time zones and work schedules - he’d just started teaching social studies at West Side Collaborative Middle school in Manhattan, and with the commute factored kept long hours. Outside of LinkedIn, we’d never reconnected on Social Media, which, given our political differences was probably a blessing.

We'd been making vague plans for him to come visit me in Oregon. Joe was an accomplished poker player - semi-professional, playing at the same table as folks like James Woods - and I thought it would be interesting to bring him to a casino to watch him in action. 

Then the pandemic started.  

The last conversation we had was in spring, 2020. The lockdown had going on for a couple of months, and the strain of the pandemic was already making everyone testy. At some point our conversation got heated, and while I don’t recall any argument in particular, I do remember leaving the conversation thinking yeah, I think I’ll lay off on chatting with Joe until this thing blows over. 

I guess at some point I figured that if eventually one of us would call or text the other. Weeks turned to months, and months to seasons. Life happened. 

But for Joe, life would only continue for a few months past our last conversation. He would pass away in October of 2020 of Covid, as I - to my great shame - learned only a few days ago.

I’d been meaning to reach out to him for over a year, but the longer you go without speaking the harder it gets to initiate a conversation. A few nights ago I had a dream, more vivid than most, in which he was not present but deeply involved. I made a recording of the dream, along with an apology for not reaching out sooner, and sent him a text message reading Mister Hurley? A Certain Dwarf is offering Mea Culpas. It seemed prudent to do that before sending a rambling account of a bizarre dream to a number that might not even be his anymore. 

When I got no reply, I looked for him on LinkedIn but couldn’t find his account. (Which is strange, since LinkedIn sends me annual reminders to celebrate career milestones of more than one long-deceased friend.)

 It took a few minutes on Google to find out that he’d died in 2020, through an absolutely glowing staff tribute written by friends, colleagues and the parents of students at the school he’d taught at less than a year.

I can add nothing to these words of praise, appreciation and admiration, so I won’t even try.  Instead, I urge you to read the tribute, written by people who knew my friend Joseph Hurley in ways in which I’m, frankly, envious. 

Joe and I often went months and years between conversations, so it’s not particularly noteworthy that we didn’t speak again between what would be our final conversation and his death in October, 2020.

But I’m ashamed at having let months turn into years. 

I’m ashamed because I should have checked in on him far earlier.

I’m ashamed because I could have been a better friend, and should have learned of his demise far sooner.

But primarily, I’m ashamed because my shame would amuse Joe.

He would laugh with the gentle sadism of someone who knows he’d been right all along getting a long-expected apology from a foolish friend who'd finally come to his senses.

I hope the spectacle of my squirming publicly on my own blog amuses you, Joe. 

I hope you’re enjoying this, wherever you are.

Catholic heaven, I presume, being reprimanded regularly by God himself - not just for arguing obscure points of holy doctrine loudly and openly with the spirits of the very clergy, bishops & popes responsible for creating them - but for winning these arguments frequently enough to alarm the angels.

I’ll miss you, Mister Hurley. My world continues to be a less erudite place without you in it. 

Requiescat in pace, Joe.

Joe and I were both fairly active political writers in the early-oughts, with me churning out a column called Politics and Other Dirty Words (first for the Colorado Daily and later for the now defunct Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) and Joe writing for a publication called The Critical Observer.  We considered collaborating on a point-counterpoint project where we'd debate various issues, but never got much further than a name for the website - politicallyincompatable.com.   

But we did collaborate on one article that wound up in the Bullhorn. Outside of emails going back as long as I've had the same Gmail account, its the written example of Joe's voice I've been able to find (ownership of www.thecriticalobserver.com seems to have changed hands - it's now a website devoted to combat sports) and thus I present our original collaboration below.

Joe Conservative: Nader Republican

The name Ralph Nader throws many Democrats into paroxysms of invective and blame. Even those who acknowledge their own candidates’ lackluster performance are quick to decry Nader as the deciding factor in the 2000 election. The quixotic consumer advocate’s announcement of his intention to run again in 2004 set off howls of indignant recrimination from Democrats across the country. Nader’s response to Democratic critics was that they ought to “Relax and Rejoice,” and that his candidacy would take votes from the left and the right.  

Few relaxed.  None rejoiced.

But there is some evidence to support Nader’s claim that his candidacy may be a double-edged sword, carving away votes from both sides of the vast American political divide. Increasingly, traditionalist Republicans and mainstream conservatives – voters without whom neither Bush Junior or Senior could ever have been elected – are breaking party ranks and expressing growing distaste for the policies of the current administration.

Joe Hurley, conservative columnist for The Critical Observer, is one of the growing number of Republican voters planning to cast their vote for Ralph Nader this fall. In this online chat, he explains to the Bullhorn’s Joshua Samuel Brown what changed his mind about Bush and why he’s planning to vote for Nader.   


JSB: So this has got to be purely a protest vote, right? I mean, is there any part of Nader’s platform that appeal to your own political sensibilities?

Joe: Well, discounting his overt socialism, I would say that the fact that he sees our current immigration policy as fundamentally flawed is a good selling point for his domestic policy.  The fact that he is totally against NAFTA and the WTO is his best selling point on foreign affairs. But, yes, it is a protest vote.

JSB: You call yourself a conservative. Would you define the term?

Joe: To understand what a conservative is, you have to understand what a "classic liberal" is. Because they're basically the same thing: We believe that the role of government should be quite limited, that people should be free to go about their business without being hindered by undo restrictions placed on their liberty. The Constitution has laid out a good model for achieving this, by keeping government in check.

JSB: Do you consider President Bush to be a conservative?

Joe: No. He’s done very little that I would define as conservative.

JSB: What, for instance, has he done that is not conservative?

Well, he said (as a candidate) that he would veto McCain-Feingold, a bill he knew to be unconstitutional, but then he signed it for political reasons. He talked about reducing the size of government, but every budget that he has submitted has increased spending in every department of the Federal Government, including the one submitted before 911.  This is not a conservative St. George slaying the big government Leviathan.  He, like so many politicians, has misrepresented himself.  And then there’s the Patriot Act…

JSB: Huh…I thought most conservatives liked the Patriot act because it’s designed to prevent future 911 type attacks.

Joe: Sure, and most of the Patriot Act does just that.  But it is one thing to assume wartime powers, it’s quite another to strip us of our due-process rights as a matter of law.  FDR and Lincoln did things that they considered necessary to win their wars.  FDR set up internment camps.  Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and set up political prisons for, among others, dissenting journalists and editors.  But they did this by executive order. They did not turn these obviously unconstitutional measures into law. Congress effectively showed their approval by not calling for their impeachment. But these clowns in Washington nowadays are stripping us of our most basic rights.

JSB: So why not just vote for Kerry?

Joe: Well, Bush may be a disappointment, but I'm downright afraid of a John Kerry Presidency. Kerry has given us every indication that he would address Islamic Terror against America the same way that most previous administrations have, as criminal acts rather than as acts of war. Now, if we weren't attacked on 9/11, and we weren't at war, I would vote for Kerry. Not because I like him, but to directly punish Bush for not keeping his word.  This is what we did to his father. Remember, it was not the liberal voter that Bush Sr. lost (he never had them). It was the conservative base that he lost. He didn't keep his “No new taxes” promise, and it cost him a second term.

JSB: Is conservatism the sole domain of the Republican Party? Is it possible, for example, to be a conservative democrat?

Joe: Sure, look at Zell Miller, Democratic Senator from Georgia, Or Joe Leiberman.  But your question is fundamentally flawed, because the Republican Party is not in the business of being conservative.  They are in the business of getting conservative votes.

JSB: Last fall you wrote an article advising prospective Democratic candidates that the way that they could beat Bush would be to get the vote of people like you, and then went so far as to offer them an ironclad way to go about this. Can you summarize this?

Joe: Well, the full article is available online at www.thecriticalobserver.com, but in a nutshell, I suggested that the nominee accuse Bush of not doing enough in the war on terrorism and then promise to bring the war to the enemy by holding Saudi Arabia accountable. Whoever that Democrat was, if they did that, they’d win in a landslide.

JSB: Do you still feel this way?

Joe: Absolutely. If Kerry could convince me that he would fully wage war against our enemy, no matter what the political cost, I would vote for him.  Hell, I would campaign for him. But I don't believe that he will ever address the problem in this way…  But if he did position himself as a more ruthless wartime leader than Bush, I believe that he would win.

JSB: You live in NY, a state whose electoral votes the GOP seems to have all but written off. If you lived in a swing state like Ohio, or even a weakly-for-Bush state like Colorado, would you still vote for Nader?

Joe: No. As bad as Bush is, at least he’s engaging the enemy, if only in a limited fashion. To tell the truth, what we really need is a Democrat like FDR, or a Republican like Teddy Roosevelt. But I’d hold my nose while I voted.

JSB: Do you think that Nader will be taking votes from Bush…besides yours, I mean?

Joe: Yes, Nader will get more than few Conservative votes, but most of these will be from states where the risk of hurting Bush will be very small. I know people who think like I do, but we all agree that we couldn't afford to waste our votes on Nader in a swing state like Ohio or Florida.  In the end, I think Nader will get far more votes in the solid "Blue" or "Red" states than he will in the "battleground" states. Hopefully the message will get through to the GOP; you do not own the conservative vote!

JSB: So, do you think that Democrats should be afraid of Nader?

Joe: No.

JSB: But if you really thought they should be, would you tell them?

Joe: No, probably not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before getting into the worst hostel I've ever stayed in, I figured that, for comparison's sake, I'd describe the second worst. I was on assignment in Belize City for Lonely Planet, and we’d gotten several emails complaining about the place from readers. The main reader complaint was that it felt “unsafe.”  Since I was traveling as part of a trio - myself, the Rough Guides writer, and a burly friend from NY along for the ride - I figured the experience wouldn’t be too perilous.

There are worse places to spend the night in Belize City. 

The Caribbean colonial-style house had seen better decades. The kitchen was unsanitary, the rooms threadbare, and the common areas unkempt. The proprietor was a dodgy hippie, and the overall ambiance of the place was of a Rainbow Gathering campsite best avoided. My chief recollection from our stay were of multiple comings and goings throughout the night. We’d just start drifting off when we’d be woken up by heavy footsteps on the wooden porch, followed by the squeaking open and slamming shut of the front door. After a few minutes of indistinct conversation and activity from the first floor, the process would reverse. This happened about a dozen times between midnight and four AM, indicating that providing rooms for travelers may not have been the proprietor's sole income stream.  We left the hostel at dawn, forfeiting a free breakfast of instant coffee and white toast with a butter-like substance, and I removed the property from the guidebook on health and safety grounds. 

Still, we managed to get a few hours of sleep between the banging, and a steady sea breeze coming through the screen windows kept the atmosphere in our shared dorm room comfortable enough.

This was not the case during my recent stay at the Cambie Gastown Hostel in Vancouver, Canada, where I spent a sleepless night in the communal kitchen / hangout room blearily searching for last-minute accommodations on various websites, chatting with friends in Asia on Facebook, and waiting for the sun to rise so I could leave. 

Booking my stay on Hotels.com, I was aware of the overall vibe of the neighborhood and the reputation of the Cambie Gastown as a party hostel. That was part of the experience I was looking for, the sort whose rougher edges would be smoothed by a couple of beers and a good pair of earplugs. 

What I wasn’t prepared for were the squalid conditions of the room itself, which reminded me of the worker’s dorms attached to the factories I used to inspect in China before leaving the compliance industry for the far more copasetic world of travel writing.

The room photo on Hotels.com shows a cheerful four bed hostel room with brick walls, high ceilings, big windows, and a reasonable amount of space between bunks.

The photos from the Cambie’s website show a similar array of bright, cheerful and fairly spacious rooms with high ceilings and clean floors.

None of these photos lined up with the reality of my room, which was a third of the size as the one in the photo above, with stained walls and a low ceiling with collapsing panels. 

(Photo taken just after sunrise following my last minute idiot check of the bunk I’d exited in the dark seven hours earlier. Not a great shot of a none-too great room.)

That much I could have written off as creative exaggeration. 

The room’s complete lack of ventilation was another matter.  With neither floor nor ceiling fans, the room was uncomfortably hot and cramped. The top bunk was absolutely sweltering, especially with the window and drapes closed against the noise and light of downtown Vancouver.

Between the stifling heat and general concern over the appallingly bad ventilation (we are, after all, still in the age of Covid) sleep was impossible. 

Just after midnight I went downstairs and asked if there were a room with a lower bunk, or failing that, an electric fan. The night manager told me neither were available. I got the feeling that he’d answered the same question many times. 

Rather than lie awake on a sweltering bunk, I elected to spend the night on a couch the common room with Oreo, the hostel cat (and only good thing about my stay at the Cambie), surfing on my phone and chatting occasionally with other guests who expressed similar sentiments about the lack of ventilation in their rooms. 

With time to kill before dawn, I toured the facilities (such as they were). Unless I missed something, these consisted of two cramped bathrooms with three toilet stalls and three showers each on each floor. As each floor of the hostel has (approximately) 25 rooms, each containing between 4-6 beds, this would put the guest/toilet ratio at around 20 guests per toilet. Both of the men’s rooms floors were flooded. 

I left just after sunrise, hauling myself and my bags after a full day of travelling and a fully sleepless night through the just waking streets of Downtown Vancouver and onto the train to Richmond, where - thankfully - my Airbnb host had arranged an early check-in.

Over the past three decades of travel (including a dozen years doing guidebook updates for Lonely Planet) I’ve probably visited a hundred hostels across the globe. Some were lovely, others squalid, most were somewhere in between. I’ve spent more than a few nights in windowless rooms in Hong Kong’s infamous Chungking Mansion.  Had my 9/10/23 stay at Vancouver’s Cambie Hostel been part of a guidebook assignment, I would delist it. 

The price I paid for a bed in a four-bed hostel dorm (around $55 USD) would be considered in the reasonable-high range for a similar bed in a decent hostel anywhere in North America, but is (in the opinion of this travel writer) far too high given the conditions I found at the Cambie Gastown during my stay, Based on this experience, I've reached out to Hotels.com suggesting that they look into delisting the Cambie Hostel, or at least reducing its star rating from the current two down to a one. (Call me a stickler, but I feel like a place that refuses to provide in-room electric fans can't be considered higher than a one-star property.)

My own takeaway from the experience was this: Despite the overwhelming amount amount of ways the internet has given us to pre-plan trips and book hotels in advance online, nothing beats a guidebook that's updated every couple of years by a seasoned traveler who's visited each listed property.

I am unsure whether hotels.com employs professional travel writers to assess properties listed on their site, or simply relies on aggregate reviews from clients. My emails to the customer service link at the site asking this question has thus far gone unanswered. I do know that a truncated version of this experience - submitted five days ago as a review on Hotels.com - has yet to be posted.

If this changes (or if Cambie management choses to chime in), I'll update this post. In the meantime, Caveat viator (let the traveler beware).

Like posts where your intrepid travel writer rails against unscrupulous elements in the travel industry? Greasy Eggs and Ham in a Tropical Limbo is an oldie but a goodie! 

Geoffrey H. Goodwin, writer, poet, genius and gentle madman of note in my world is no more, having passed away in June, just a few weeks after our last conversation. Lacking mutual connections, I only just found out. Sorry for the delay in writing this, Geoff, but if anyone would have nothing but good things to say about this belated eulogy it would be you.  

Geoff and I met in the year 2000 in Boulder, Colorado. He was getting his MFA at Naropa University and I'd gravitated to Colorado for the first time between various multi-year overseas gigs. We kept in fairly regular contact over the years, and managed to connect three or four times in the mid 00's - twenty teens, mostly in the Boston area where Geoffrey lived for a decade or so after getting his MFA (in Horror Writing if memory serves, a funny degree to get from a Buddhist university). I spent a night at his apartment in Framingham once, curled up on a sleeping bag next to a bookshelf crammed with paperbacks, science fiction novels, obscure stuff if memory serves. Geoff was a self-confessed "problem book collector."

Geoffrey was also among the kindest people I've ever known. I cannot recall a single conversation we ever had in which he expressed rancor, bitterness or malaise towards a fellow human being. His overall bearing and temperament was not unlike that of  Eliot Rosewater, the titular character of Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, a damaged, beautiful person who loved all beings unconditionally. 

I told Geoffrey this once, and he laughed.

In 2014 Geoffrey's life took a bad turn when he was in a car accident caused by a drunken driver. The accident left him in chronic pain, which led to medication, which led to sporadic bouts of madness. (Sporadic madness was a condition which Vonnegut's Rosewater also endured.) We would talk about these bouts of madness from time to time, usually afterwards. He always tried to make them sound fun, or at least amusing in hindsight.  

I wish we'd spoken more than twice a year over the past decade, but so it goes. He would occasionally send me pictures and improvised music tracks. I'd try to do the same. We had vague plans to have him come and visit, but his health issues made that seem long term at best. 

The last conversation we had was about Philip K. Dick. Geoff was a massive fan of PKD; somewhere I have a blurry photo of Geoff sitting on PKD's grave, but I can't seem to locate it at the moment, so this belated eulogy will have to go out with an even blurrier photo I have of Geoff, probably taken in Boulder with my first digital camera. I'd asked his opinion on the Amazon Man in the High Castle series. He said he thought PKD's Electric Dreams was better, which led to a conversation about the merits of various PKD screen projects that kind of petered out the way text conversations often do.

I wish I'd called him sooner, but again, so it goes.

I'm looking for a suitable PKD quote to close this thing out, but I know that whatever I find will fail to encapsulate my dear and complicated friend. Despite this, I am sure that Geoffrey would say of whatever quote I picked "YES! That's the perfect one. That's exactly the one I would have picked. Thank you, my friend. Thank you."

So I'm going to go with this one, from one of PKD's more obscure works, Our Friends From Frolix 8.

 "The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give." 

~ Philip K. Dick

Goodbye old friend.  My world is smaller, less kind and less weird without you in it.

When Stephanie and I wrote Formosa Moon in 2017, we included a chapter called We Are Not Gardeners, based largely on our lack of enthusiasm for gardening despite living at the time in a village halfway to Wulai in Taipei called New Garden City. 
It wasn't the book's strongest chapter, and wound up being off-putting to some folks I know who are themselves very much gardeners - though I think Permaculture Practitioners is the more accurate terms these days.
Anyway, Five years later and We Are Gardeners.

Shortly after returning to the states in 2019 we began scouting out long term locations for the great hunkering down to come, getting in some hands-on training at the St. John's community garden in Portland. We'd lucked out insofar as our plot's previous attendant had a good crop of asparagus going, but for the most part it was low maintenance. After searching for half a year around the Northern Oregon coast & coastal Washington, we hadn't found anyplace in our budget that wasn't either in immanent danger of becoming water damaged or already so. (One place we'd put down earnest money for in Raymond, Washington had a partially rotted foundation that the owner had hidden behind a fake wall, which Stephanie  discovered during the inspection process. We got back the earnest money, but still paid for the inspection.)  
So we began searching on the other side of the Gorge & Mountains and quickly decided that we'd be learning to garden in dryer climates than that offered by Taiwan, or Portland, for that matter, and wound up in Umatilla County, about halfway between Portland and Idaho.
Last year was mostly a bust. We'd moved in March, and didn't really get the garden going until May. We made the mistake of putting all four raised beds on the front easement, which meant they cooked during a week in July with daytime temps hitting between 113-118 F for five days straight, killing half the plants despite hastily erected shade canopies. 


The thing we did do right was to spend the first year building soil. We got two chip drops from a local arborist, which helped transformed the backyard from lawn to something we could work with. 


Over the winter, we moved the boxes and soil from the easements to the backyard and got serious about planting starts indoors. I ordered a metric shit ton (a legitimate permaculture measurement) of seeds from Baker Creek in January:

On the day they arrived I proceeded to make my first mistake by planting all 72 cells of a starter tray with six different tomato plants.

Nearly all came up, so for the next three months I was potting up several dozen plants 2-4 times and moving them around the house in an ongoing Foliage Tetris until I could either plant them or give them away. At one point, half of the backyard was taken up by tomato plants, about half in a raised bed and the other in soil I'd kind of dug into using the decomposing wood chips.  I was glad to have laid in a good supply of  Thriving Design's C-Bites, though next year I'll design the garden around the trellis system rather than building the trellises halfway through the summer.

Tomatoes wound up being the most water / work intensive crops I grew this year, and I didn't wind up having a great yield - lots of green but little fruit, with most (outside of a couple of beautiful Paul Robeson dark indigos, maybe the best tomato I've ever tasted) stunted. The best producers were some delicious yellow cherry tomatoes, which we were eating for about six weeks.

Summer was milder this year, but the warm weather hung around until about two weeks ago, and the tomato plants (which I'd only recently started clipping with any real seriousness) had a few fruit worth grabbing before the frost, and I wanted to set garlic in to overwinter.  

The plants we pulled up had strong, gnarly root systems and well developed trunks, so my prognosis is that some combination of starting  them off in nitrogen rich soil (I'd mixed in a slurry made with alfalfa pellets a month or so before transplanting), planting them too close, not being aggressive enough in clipping the suckers, and maybe not paying attention to fertilization blends (I got creative with a couple of organic blends, but didn't take notes) resulted in way more plant than fruit.

 

There is a lesson in this for those who care to look. Next year I will plant fewer tomatoes, and simultaneously take them more and less seriously.

 

Next in Tales from the Garden (Mistakes Were Made): Success with Spuds and Lessons About Corn Learned Too Late.

 

Three years since I ceased chronicling my life on this thing, something I'd been doing fairly steadily since 2006.

The whys are multifold.

For one thing, I'd stopped moving, and for a lifelong nomad movement is tantamount to being interesting. Without endless travel, who am I? 

For another, I became bored with chronicling events in long-form prose in an era when everything was moving to the short dopamine hits favored by the matrix. 

And finally, after a dozen+ guidebooks, two books of short stories, a novel which...let's just say that while Spinning Karma got some good reviews, it didn't do so well at the box office and leave it at that.

In any event, I'm back. Partly because I miss writing, and partly because the Snarky Tofu brand has been appropriated by a T-shirt company (look 'em up yourself - why should I give their algorithm a boost) and I figure hey, why not.

(Blogger has changed it's interface. I cannot make heads or tails out it. Fuck it, I still remember basic HTML coding. Does this thing even have a spell checker anymore? Will anyone notice? Is anyone even out there anymore?) 

Anyway, I need to assume someone is. Hello!

My last howl into darkness was on my 50th birthday, January of 2020. We'd returned to Portland after three years in Taiwan and were about to embark on an exciting new chapter in my long career in tourism. And then...2020 unfolded. And the travel industry collapsed, along with so much else.

A kidney stone of a year
After a few months of unemployment, I transitioned from a mostly-dead travel industry into the quite alive social services field, in which I am still gainfully employed. 
Somewhere along the way we adopted a cat. Later on, another cat we'd given up for adoption when we moved to Taiwan came back to us. 
Full time employment has its perks. Banks will lend you money more readily. After a year of lockdown in a one-bedroom apartment in North Portland, Stephanie and I bought a house out in a town called Pendleton, way out in the dry side of the Pacific Northwest. It's a big house, built in either 1939 or 1941, depending on who you ask. 
Our Castle and Our Keep (Mid-May)
Gardening. All those years hanging out with permaculture people planted seeds. If you happen to be one of these people, I was taking notes. This year I grew corn, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peas, sunflowers, yams and a few other items. Next year I'll grow more. The Garden, Mid-August
This seems as good a place as any to stop. 
If we've lost contact over the years and you want to reconnect, you'll find me at the same email address I've had since this blog started. 
For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I feel like ending my first foray back into blogging with a few lines of dialogue from Apocalypses Now:

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound. 
Kurtz : Are my methods unsound? 
Willard : I don't see any method at all, sir.

No method at all. Indeed.

The Birthday BoyMy 50th birthday was somewhat anti-climatic, spent in Taipei looking for a suitably special Japanese restaurant but the local gods did not favor us that weekday evening, with every spot we hit either closed or about to close. Stephanie and wound up buying imported lunch meat and cheese at one of the fancy supermarkets on Chungxiao road and calling it a night. This is 51, and we’ve just come back from Maru restaurant on Division Street in Portland, so clearly there’s been a major shift in both luck and geography. So call this a year-end catch-up post, starting now and moving backwards before coming back to the big 51.
Speaking of back, we’re back in Portland, having pulled in just before New Year’s Eve, three years to the day from when we’d left to start research on Formosa Moon. Speaking of Formosa Moon and Portland, we’ll be doing a reading at Belmont Books on February 22nd, but more on that in a future post. In a few days we’ll be signing a lease for our new place in St. John’s, long one of my favorite neighborhoods in Portland. Contact me if you want to visit. We’ll have a lovely view of the Willamette river. (Considering having a housewarming party after our reading at Belmont Books on February 22 - it’s a Saturday, so makes sense.)
On the subject of books, last week I signed a contract with Camphor Press to publish my first novel, Spinning Karma. Way more on this later, but extremely happy to be working with Camphor Press, and to finally spring my long-awaited Buddhist Comedy onto an unsuspecting public. While the story begins in America (in my one-time home state of Colorado, to be precise), it quickly moves to Taiwan (and China, with a few stopovers along the way in spots ranging from Washington DC to California), proving I guess that, while you can take the man out of Taiwan you can’t take Taiwan out of the man. Or his writing, at least. But that said, yes, we’re out of Taiwan, having left in late June to attend to my mother’s transition from this life to wherever she currently finds herself. (I suspect she’s hanging around Anthony Bourdain & making herself a nuisance, which I guess serves both of them right for checking out a bit earlier than necessary, but who am I to judge?)
So yes, about to start my 51st (or is it 52nd ?) year with a much-appreciated bit of stability, a return to form in the state I’ve called home for most of my forties. And St. John’s is fitting, because it’ll be the second time I’ve lived in St. John’s, though the first time was St. John’s, Newfoundland, which is about as far away as you can get in North America from Portland, and also because the neighborhood has a bit of a Seattle in the early 90’s vibe about it, which I feel like I can say because I lived in Seattle in the early 90’s.
OK, onward to the personal thanking people on Facebook bit. Drop me a line if you’re interested in attending what we expect will be the first of many public reading from Formosa Moon outside of Taiwan at 3pm, February 22nd at Belmont Books in Portland.     

We've just reached Colorado on our great Oregon Trail 2019 road trip.

The last time I was in the state was when I lived in Loveland in Autumn, 2010. It was the third and last time that I'd lived in Colorado, having called the state home for various periods between overseas stints in the late nineties and mid and late oh-ohs.

I'd last left on December 31st, bound for my third project in Belize for Lonely Planet. As anyone who's ever spent any time on Colorado's front range can attest, the place has a powerful energy, the sort that can make leaving either impossible or an imperative. In my case it was the latter. I remember leaving the little cottage that had been my home for just a few months in a rental car, driving to catch a midnight flight to Central America, smoking a menthol American Spirit with the windows open in sub-zero temperature. The Peter Gunn theme might have been going through my head. I wouldn't be surprised.

In any event, it feels strange to be back, nine years later. Back to 2019, to catch up any Snarky Tofu readers who need catching up (if there are any Snarky Tofu readers left to be caught up).

Stephanie and I left Taiwan in July, and spent the autumn of 2019 in Boston for reasons complicated and partly related to my mother’s August decision to shuffle off her mortal coil. The death of another matriarch, Madame Ding of China and New England, led to our being offered a three-month contact involving free housing in a Boston suburb in exchange for pet care duties for two dogs, a pug called Kafka and a terrier named Borges. 

By early December it was time to leave Boston, and having repatriated from subtropical Taiwan in mid-summer, we were eager to be on our way to avoid having to spend the winter in the Northeast. Ten days ago we left Boston on the ill-advised winter road trip shown, roughly speaking, on this google map. It's wound up being an eventful trip, visiting old haunts in Rochester, having dinner with the editor of Funny Times (more stories in 2020 - perhaps I shall call Mr. Bangs out of retirement), strange food tasting sessions with our very cool friends The Neighbor's Cat and Afoolzerrand.com (she's the world's foremost expert in cat cafes, he scours the globe sampling chocolate milk), visiting with the in-laws and almost going ice-fishing, and having an interesting journey in general. 
Also, there have been multiple meals at Perkins. I'm not proud of this, but there you are.
In any event, we're halfway across as the crow flies, but somewhat less as the road rolls owing to our plan to dip south to avoid the worst of winter and avoid having to go Donner Party before getting home to the Pacific Northwest.
More later. Much to report from these strange and formative late days in Babylon. Our dual-authored adventures in Taiwan AKA Formosa Moon has been selling well. It will sell even better if you click here and buy a copy.  
More from the road, I remain yours fraternally and (for most of you) platonically,
Snarky Tofu

Joshua Samuel Brown (Vignettes of Taiwan, Lonely Planet Taiwan) and Stephanie Huffman cordially invite you to a book launch party for their latest book, Formosa Moon, at Taipei's Red Room! Published by Things Asian Press, Formosa Moon is a romantic and geeky cultural journey around Taiwan undertaken by a couple comprised of a seasoned guidebook writer intimately familiar with Taiwan and a first-time visitor who agreed to leave everything behind and relocate to Taiwan sight unseen. Along the way the couple lose themselves in Taoist temples, feast on street food and explore Taiwan’s breathtaking scenery while also engaging in less typical expatriate activities including filming a clandestine puppet show in a hijacked hotel lobby, accidentally taking up chicken farming in their residential Taipei neighborhood, and allowing themselves to be briefly sucked into a local religious cult…all in the name of cultural immersion. Part travelogue, part guidebook, part memoir, Formosa Moon is a dual-voice narrative offering practical travel information about this young and vibrant democracy while commenting hilariously on their often unusual travel experiences around the country, ultimately inspiring readers to explore Taiwan on a deeper level. Join the authors of Formosa Moon for a reading, live reenactments, book signing, food, drinks, puppetry and more at the Red Room on Saturday, October 27, starting at 5pm. Admission is free, and a good time is guaranteed!


What: Formosa Moon Launch PartyWhen: October 27, 2018 - 15:00 - 19:00 (5pm-9pm)Where: The Red Room, Jianguo S. Rd. Sec.1 #177 (1st building on the left, 2F)   建國南路一段177號 （入口左邊第一棟灰色大樓2F),


Can't make the party? Order your copy of Formosa Moon online!

The Red Room is an ever-expanding community exploring and extending the boundaries between audience and performer through events centered around the spoken word, music, visual arts, theater, and family friendly activities, Red Room is a community hub where participants can explore their passion with other artists and creatives.


What people are saying about Formosa Moon

“I don’t know if this is the most exhaustive book ever written in English about Taiwan, but I feel like it might be the coolest and weirdest. It’s definitely a lot of fun.” Freddy Lim, New People’s Party Legislator / Chthonic Lead Singer
“Joshua Samuel Brown and Stephanie Huffman have pulled off something remarkable: A love letter to Taiwan grounded in deep experience and fresh eyes. A beautiful book for the beautiful island. “ Andrew Leonard, Salon.com

“What a delight! Joshua Samuel Brown and Stephanie Huffman offer readers an affectionate, clear-eyed view of Taiwan that highlights its complexities, its eccentricities, and its wonders. A must-read for both returning and first-time visitors to Taiwan.”Shawna Yang Ryan, Author Water Ghosts, Green Island