False alarm! False alarm!

A few days ago, I said I was going to shut up blogging. Obviously, this is not me shutting up. I require a venue, I guess, for miscellaneous expression. Because I'm just built that way. Whatever.


Okay.

Today's topic is Shanghai, China. It's a very large municipality comprised of, apparently, 17 districts. Many, many millions of people live there. All those people, all those consciousnesses! Shanghai must be thought about every now and then, because it is surreal. When you consider that great city, your synapses begin to bend and sway and glow nicely. Awesome.

Take a look at this photo. There is what you see here, and there is what can only be inferred -- the glorious, ineffable Weird; part substance and part uncanny mood.

Here's another photo, but with a very different sense of the unusual. This University City District in Songjiang surely is a marvelous setting to learn stuff. But I wouldn't be able to learn anything -- I'd just look around all the time at the water, sky, buildings, trees, and distant mountains. Just being there! But if you are, indeed, a disciplined scholar, such a setting could only enhance your ingestion of knowledge and your forms of understanding.

Going into the past, this photo will blow apart a tenuous and unsealed mind. Nanking Road in the 1930s. Those people walking and riding around there back then! -- all I have to say about the picture is that reality is preposterous and beautiful.

Shanghai