There’s a lot said about the creative process and how we manifest our work. In my case, I never planned creating a project that revolved around photography. To be honest, I’m not even sure if it even qualifies as such either. This whole thing originally started out with me trying to cut it as a writer, which as you’re sure to agree after reading this, will probably never happen.
Having spent a large chunk of my life trying to keep myself upright by leaning on a bar, stringing a half-decent sentence together has always been a bit of a challenge. Most of my communication with those around me was simply telling bad jokes full of profanities, with slurred speech while performing a deranged series of involuntary gestures that managed to illicit some form of laughter as they all took shelter from the sputum I was coughing up. It only took me a decade or two to work out that those around me were laughing at me as opposed to laughing with me. I do take solace in the fact that most of these people were usually drunk too and otherwise unremarkable.
Saying that, it is true that sobering up for a while really does change your perspective, and when you see the world for what it truly is, you soon realize that it’s best to start drinking again. So, I’m now on my second can of lager while writing this…and we’ll see how many paragraphs it takes for all this to stop making any coherent sense and degrade into complete and utter drivel.
For years I enjoyed just taking pictures of the sun rising and setting while walking my dog. There was plenty of architecture and city skylines to admire, and all the inanimate curiosities the world has to offer. When I first set out with the idea of starting a travel guide, I realized that I had 20,0000 or so photos, which not too shabby, seemed to lack any life. I started to realize that their was a crucial element missing, there were no people. Though fed up with people, and I still pretty much am, I begrudgingly had to admit that I had to interact with them again. There’s were reasons for everything, and I shall divulge as time goes by, but it’s quite the story.
There are more than a few upstanding ladies and gentlemen who in their misguided sense of righteousness would rather not have me tell it, because it casts their narrative in a very different light. But all things considered, an individual has as much right to silence the crowd, as the crowd has to silence the individual. By acting as a collective, a unified opinion is formed by consensus, but it doesn’t mean that it’s right by any stretch of the imagination. Instead of those in a that collective admitting they were wrong, they often find it’s easier to back each other up in falsehood, a luxury that is unfortunately not afforded to the individual when it comes to staking their claim. They do get to share their story, and it only has to reach one person to change the tide.
But this is a story about how I started to reconnect with the people in the world around me for better or for worse. I haven’t rediscovered a newfound love for humanity, but I have redefined my relationship with people by removing my anger towards them. I have not replaced that anger with love, but with a rational acceptance and indifference. This isn’t about me or them, it’s about something greater; something I am perhaps not meant to fully understand, and that’s where my love is directed to.
This tale begins in the town of Niagara Falls, when coming down from some shrooms and completely soaked after a trip on the Maid in the Mist (those ponchos are fucking useless), I ended up on a bus riding around from one end of the town to the other, trying to figure out where I was going to rest my head for the night. Niagara Falls is ridiculously expensive and there are no hostels. It’s actually a bit of a cesspool, rife with drugs, human trafficking and palpable poverty. The town itself could really do with a shot in the arm. No pun intended. But more than that, I was looking for something divine, like a sign or anything to help point my life in the right direction. Canada hadn’t worked out and though I had found support from corners I would not have normally expected to, the universe seemed to be telling me to move on.
A young woman got on the bus shortly after myself and sat in the seat across from me. As we were waiting for the bus to depart I noticed that she appeared to have a black eye. I couldn’t help but feel drawn to her as my heart sank, and after hearing and witnessing all the stories about human trafficking in Canada, especially in the town of Niagara Falls, I felt the need to reach out and talk to her, I just didn’t know where to begin. I soon ended up falling asleep and woke up as the bus had come to a standstill at the last stop. The young woman, along with all the other passengers, had obviously gotten off along the route.
So, there was sod all else to do, but ride the bus back into town. To my surprise, the same young woman got back on the bus about ten minutes later and this time she came and sat beside me. Like a lot of Asian women, she had a petit yet voluptuous frame, and a captivating melancholic beauty that pierced the soul. She would also turn her head and raise a brief smile before looking away again in way that was almost identical to somebody who used to be close to me. Not knowing what else to say and wanting to find out if she was OK, I turned round and asked her straight about her eye.
She explained to me that it was birthmark and not a blackeye. While we spoke, she would keep glancing at her phone, which appeared to have picture of her boyfriend on her home screen. The guy did look a little shady, but I’m not exactly innocent looking either. Hell, when walking down the street in Nova Scotia people would literally come out of their homes and make sure their cars were locked. Little did they know that I don’t even know how to drive. So, perhaps my concern had been misplaced, or perhaps she felt she couldn’t speak out about it, but I chose not to judge based on the way somebody dresses in a picture. Or for that matter to form an opinion based on a young woman’s beauty and then fulfil a selfish personal need to play the hero. That was her answer, and it was up to me to accept it.
My new partner, who loves the TV show Friends, recently showed me a scene in which Rachel and Phoebe are discussing getting tattoos together. Rachel seems a little hesitant and talks about her boyfriend Ross not being too keen on the idea. Phoebe then goes off on a tangent about how Rachel should not be allowing Ross to control or influence her decisions, and by doing so, is being just as controlling and pushy. In the end, Rachel caves in and gets the tattoo, only to come out of the studio to find out that Phoebe herself had chickened out of the whole thing.
It strikes me as an interesting metaphor that applies to so much happening around us these days, with too many people convinced that they are doing the right thing by taking control of a situation or somebody in the name of saving another, that perhaps doesn’t even need saving. They force their will upon another’s life by intervening and fucking it all up for everybody except themselves. Then after causing all that damage and harm, they go home, put their feet up whilst patting each other on the back and saying “Job well done, aren’t we fucking tops!” I too have been guilty of that in the past without realizing it, and in most cases I solemnly believe that people simply don’t realize the implications of their actions.
In other cases, they’ve just conditioned themselves to believe they are allowed to cause harm in the name of religion or being a social justice warrior and filling the empty void in their own life by taking the moral high ground and fueling their willful ignorance by hiding behind a book or twitter. It actually just comes down to them wanting to control how they believe another person’s world should look because of their own morality. But somehow to me, that seems like horribly immoral concept.
However, to get back to the story, this young woman studying to be a nanny, left a lasting impression on me that I will never forget. As we conversed, there was something about her, the words she used and her mannerisms, that felt like an old friend was channeling her to send me a message. I told her that I had plans to travel to Asia in the near future and asked her where she was from. “Nepal,” she replied.
My dog who had been with me for almost half my life had died a few months prior and I missed him dearly. But new paths had now opened up for me, and I was intent on walking them. I was low on cash, had no home or job to go back to as I spent most of my life moving around. I don’t feel any sense of longing or belonging other than where I am in the present. Something that I think most I people I seem to meet simply can’t comprehend.
Home is in my head, which is experience the present. I’m not trying to come across as one of those enlightened yoga-loving, coffee cup-hugging cunts hanging around Starbucks with their fucking Macbooks, because the present and my head can be one hell of a miserable place to be at sometimes, but then again take a walk though most suburban neighborhoods that people call home, and you’ll find that those are actually pretty damn miserable places to be more or less all of the time.
I have lived a very peripatetic life. I’m a bit of gypsy, though not by ethnicity or culture, just simply because I keep moving. I can’t even sit still for 30 seconds unless inebriated. The term rolling stone isn’t really appropriate either, as that would imply that I’m cool. Driftwood getting dragged along by the current, or a piece of space debris that would occasionally get drawn into a gravitational orbit and end up getting pulled in a certain direction would be more appropriate. You always want to have as much influence and control of your life and where you end up as you can, but for all that talk of infinite possibilities and manifesting wealth and miracles, I certainly didn’t have an infinite amount of cash at my disposal, had no idea how to manifest any, and desperately needed a fucking miracle.
Asia seemed to tick all the boxes for a financially and emotionally broke wannabe writer. But after a few weeks scouring over the map, Nepal for some strange reason simply never occurred to me, until now. And that was it, I now knew where I was going.
A quick search of Kathmandu turned up some great pics, accommodation seemed to be very affordable on my limited resources, and I could just picture myself sitting on a hostel rooftop sipping a coffee with a wee morning toke as I was taking in Mount Everest away off in the distance. I was sold. After a brief but very eventful few days in Tokyo after departing the Great White North, I was off to the top of the world and Shambhala. Everything was going to work out, things were gonna change, I could feel it.
As the plane landed and I disembarked towards the terminal building, I could only describe my initial impression as follows, “Fuck me gently!” It was absolute chaos, and I had never experienced anything quite like it. The heavily armed security at the airport made the fact that this country had just come out of civil war a few years ago feel all too real, if not surreal. At this point it did occur to me that perhaps a little more thorough research would have been prudent. Gunnar, the cab driver who took me to my hotel and had a face that looked like he shaved with a blowtorch, did nothing to allay those fears. It was a true culture shock in a way that I had never experienced, but according to some people I met on the road, it’s mellow compared to India. They apparently escape to the chaos of Kathmandu to get away from it all.
It took me a few days to find my feet, and after getting hustled a few times, I eventually found them as the locals had at least been nice enough to at least leave them attached to my legs for me. At this juncture I was also trying to make it clear to everybody that I wasn’t a regular tourist, I was out here trying survive, was probably broker than them, and had next to nothing to spend on tours or treks, as opposed to all the hippy twats who were on some eat, pray, love spiritual journey and politely requested they go hustle them instead. It took a while for the penny to drop, but I was eventually shown some mercy.
I was there to try and write this amazing new travel guide I had conjured up in my mind that would put the Lonely Planet to shame…but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where to begin. So, I just kept on walking around trying to take snaps of buildings and statues around the city and continued my routine of trying to avoid taking pictures of all the people walking past me in the street.
I’m a quite big guy that stands well over six feet tall and at the time had a long black braided beard with a shaved head and bandana. To say I stood out like a sore thumb in Nepal would be putting it lightly. So, people were constantly asking to either be photographed with me or take pictures of me, which to me still felt incredibly annoying. Contrary to popular belief about me being worried about the cops hunting me down because of wanted dead or alive poster, this was actually something that went all the way back to my infancy. My grandmother’s best picture of me from the age of 8 onwards was taken without my knowledge, and when I was in the middle of taking my jumper off.
But they just kept pestering me. I would start by refusing politely and then after being pestered a little more would slip into the more profane refusal. It all came to a head one night when I was sitting eating an egg curry in the best curry house Kathmandu’s Thamel district called Green Villy. I’d love to say, it was something I discovered myself, but it was introduced to me by an Argentinian chap I met called Guido, who I obnoxiously referred to as King Monkey due to all the travel tricks and knowledge this guy seemed to have tucked up his sleeve. Guido is the ultimate backpacker and if he ever wrote a travel guide, I would tell you to read that and stop wasting your time with whatever this is. I cuffed him at chess a few times though.
Anyway, to get back on track as I do tend to meander, as I was sitting eating my curry, this guy comes in and sits at one of the tables opposite me. He then proceeds to take his phone out of his pocket and take a picture of me, which to put it bluntly, really pissed me off. Now, people are photographing me as I eat? C’mon!
So, after addressing this gentleman in the politest way I could given my perception of the circumstances, and not really making much headway, I too reached for my phone and said, “Well fuck it, if you’re taking a picture of me, I’ll take a picture of you.” At the time, it just pissed me off even more, as the guy just turned round as calm as could be and posed with a smile on his face. Though, I didn’t realize it at the time, this particular moment would mark a sea change that would have a ripple effect in ways I am still learning to understand more and more about on a daily basis. The picture I took in Green Villy that night can be seen below.
Quite a lot of the pictures in this project weren’t planned but I reckon have worked out looking better than if I would’ve planned them.
Carl Jung, I think, has a few phrases about art seizing the body, and he may very well have a point, but the more I think about it, it feels like something much deeper and on a grander scale. I am not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person, and find that religious symbols regardless of which, tend to hold a lot of power and could be viewed as a way the universe or God communicates with us. As opposed to the book, which is used to control and subjugate us and thereby stop us from having a relationship with that higher power.
When I first ventured out into Asia, I was just a troubled soul trying to survive and wasn’t on a spiritual journey to find myself in a country where I couldn’t read the street signs. In all fairness there are actually very few street signs in Kathmandu anyway. But the picture above is the creative spark which has brought this project to life. But what’s more, if you look a little closer, you’ll see something else in the picture.
In the reflection in the window, you’ll see a vague image of me taking this picture with the Buddha hovering over me, and above the gentleman’s head, you can see the Hindu deity Ganesh, the remover of obstacles and the god of wisdom, intellect and new beginnings, or at least that’s what ChatGPT says. There also a famous Nepali phrase, “Haathi mero sathi ho,” which translates as, “The elephant is my friend,” and although I didn’t realize it at the time, I’ve become to understand that it is. You can all make up your own mind about that, but I know what it means to me. For all the troubles we encounter in life there is a power out there watching over us all, and it sees, hears and will help you out, if your heart is in the right place.
All pictures in this project were taken with either a standard iPhone 11 or 14. I hope you all enjoy the imagery and the stories behind them.
