Dear reader,
I have a funny gadget attached to my site, called Google Analytics, which maps the bits of the globe where you ostensibly sit reading this blog. I've been amazed to discover fans of irreverent takes on Burma everywhere from remote Philippine villages to the Arctic upper reaches of Alaska. And believe me I understand the pleasures in audience anonymity, of ensconcing oneself in a silent conversation between written things and the responsive chatter of the mind. I am, however, schooled in the ancient art of brash, player-centric commedia theater, where masked stock characters once strutted cobbled courtyards and shouted their soliloquies, uninvited, direct from street to stars. Thus do I now feel like holding out my hat and soliciting your thoughts. Any at all. Criticism, insults, suggestions with doctoral theses to back them up that I fall unconscionably far from the center of clear thinking things.
You may even, if you like, request that I send you the bottled scent of an over-ripe Mandalay mango. I can't promise, but I could, if you're really nice, dispatch a hand-painted card, purchased in a Rangoon bazaar off a cunningly clingy street urchin, with a bucolic scene of oxen ploughing the paddy fields under fire-streaked skies, offset with a monk standing on stage left, in a swirl of red toga, gracefully fending off the sun with paper parasol...
Not that I'm attempting a bribe of any sorts.
Consider this merely a cordial invitation to hear your thoughts, your questions, your frustrations, even a mere hullo. I'd like that. The beauty of this medium, they tell us, is interactivity. Either that or I'm guilty of egregious self-indulgence.
Best Regards,
You loyal blogger