e-travels with e. trules

beijing, china there's a funny and perfect word in yiddish, "meshugah". simply translated, it means, "crazy". for example: you're a young, privileged new yawk woman, possibly of the jewish-american persuasion, the boss' daughter to be exact; you've convinced your rich, 1st generation american daddy to make your husband, chosen against daddy's firm will, vice president of the company; then after having 2 perfect and wonderful kids and filled up a huge long island house with countless, keep-up-with-the joneses possessions, you fall in love with the puerto rican cabin boy, after which you a

the forbidden city, beijing here we are. da wife and i. within the forbidden city. within the ancient, restored red chinese walls. under the massive yellow-tiled roofs. amidst the largest and most impressive conglomeration of historical buildings in all of china. this would have been unheard of any tine within the last 500 years, from the initial encasing of the royal walled city in the 15th century, up until 1911, the year when the 5 year old "last emperor", puyi, was forced from the throne. for 500 years, no commoners were allowed inside these hallowed and fortified walls, from where only t

july 28, 2007 xi'an, china i love oysters. always have. half a dozen, cold on the half shell, with a tan beer and fresh, warm bread. and butter. a perfect combination. i remember a trendy blues club on the north side of chicago, ratso's. named, no doubt after dustin hoffman's "midnight cowboy" lame hustler. notice i said "north side", not the black south side, where the blues came up from mississippi and new orleans to the big city and got electric, but on trendy lincoln avenue, pre-steppenwolf, circa 1972. anyway, ratso's had the best oysters, and even when i was broke on a hundred d

> august 8, 2007 (1 year countdown to the beijing 2008 olympics), nanjing, china, i remember back when i had cancer. hodgkin's disease. cancer of the lymphatic system. stage 3B. 1989. after the initial shock of the positive biopsy and doing my due diligent research on every steve mcqueen, alternative mexican cure i could find on the early world wide web, i opted for, and committed to, treatment by chemo therapy. whereas hodgkin's disease had, just a generation before, killed a good deal of my boyhood hero, mickey mantle's, family in the 40s and 50s, and used to be an absolutely fat

august 10, 2007 suzhou, china i  want to talk about gardens. and gardening. and life. my own. life and garden. and more geographically relevantly, suzhou’s gardens. one of the great national treasures of imperial and contemporary china. tucked just a few fertile miles upstream of shanghai, before the mighty and muddy yangtze curls and opens her wide, dragon-like mouth into the great pacific. you see, historically, the great, fierce, and warring chinese imperial dynasties always valued and invested in their beautiful and sumptuous gardens. as palaces and private kingdoms to entertain in. as

october 15, 2007 los angeles, CA i know, i know, these are supposed to be travelogues, stories from the great far off unknown. stories of adventure, insight, and discovery. stories of long houses, longer rivers, of great walls and forbidden cities, of multi-cultural, trans-global complexities. e-travels, dammit! and here i am e-mailing you from echo park, a home run away from dodger stadium, already back in LA for almost 2 months. but the fact is that i’ve been begrudgingly back to the daily grind and routine that all of us are plowing our communal and idiosyncratic ways through - since lat