Welcome to the musings -- we hope seamless and pithy, we predict sporadic, longwinded and ridden with asides -- of a semi-eponymous witness to a forbidden land.
To Burma, then, With Love.

Today seems fitting for this small birth. Today the Lady faces a new delay in the delayed debacle of a monumental delaying tactic -- a trial that has sputtered as fitfully as the generators of Rangoon and Mandalay. Today, in short, we're immersed in the daily sport of the junta's cat-and-mousing with a population that long ago learned to avert its gaze in anguished disgust. We weren't holding our breath.

The case against Aung San Suu Kyi has dragged on inside the blackening walls of Insein Prison since May 18, triggered by a kooky American who swam across the vast algae-ridden greenery of Inye lake (with a remarkable resilience to microscopic bacterial infestation, though no one appears to have found much to analyze there as such) and trespassed on the University Ave compound where Burma's Mandela has languished for 13 of the past 19 years.

What followed would all seem pretty farce, if it weren't also an excuse to twist at will through a twisted legal system and keep a symbol locked away. The trial, of course, has become a convenient opiate designed to drug local viewers of the more firebrand revolutionary stripe into a stupor of disinterest and cynicism. Either the Lady gets five years or another year, Burmese residents told me, often with a shrug, either she gets a prison sentence or more house arrest (Location to be determined). And so what? Onwards the prospects of elections next March. Onwards the slow forbidding march to freedom and democracy...

Or perhaps not. Today, for the third days in two months, diplomats and a handful of luckless local journalists sat in as silent witnesses, a grand audience for Grand Guignol. Delusions of magnanimity from on high in Naypyidaw, or a sop to the world beyond?

No matter. Few beyond much care any longer. The suspense is as palpable as watching the slow creep of mold on Rangoon's colonial edifices.

Incidentally, a moment on me. I think I'll resort to the royal "we." Less hubristic, or the more so, perhaps, but also more attuned to the schizophrenia of this blogger -- a reporter masked with a pseudonym wrapped in a caricature. I've got to ensure that I can go back to visit.

Disclaimer: I won't pretend to be neutral here. I'll opt for fairness. My opinions, where salient, derive from regular dialogue with friends across the country and a couple of deeply invested undercover trips to for a US newspaper. Hoping in future postings and other published things to piece together the disparate states of mind of a thousand anonymous Burmese.

But let's be clear. I'm in love with Burma and I'm going to tell it like it is, as I understand it, spiced with the myopia of a romantic who misses like hell the faint smell of jasmine and the sudden appearance of a crumbling golden pagoda from the midst of an alley of mango sellers.