To all my pop culture kids who grew up on video games and church on Sunday:

To all those who also have a hard time fully relating to "My body is a temple"
If you've ever used collecting experience points as a form of meditation...
Then this is for you.
Have you ever wished you could skip forward in game time so you could finally have that stellar new body armor imbued with +3 all skills and +25% elemental resist?
A way to finally rush wave after wave of monsters with uber ease wearing a complete and total suit of godliness?
Well please know that this particular moment in RLT (real life time) happens to be particularly benefiting to your overall inventory.
You have right now in your stash at this very instant a highly sophisticated machine...
Capable of literally anything.
It is a vehicle of "I can do Infinity" mixed with completely dummy-proof operating systems.
Fully modifiable with enormous capacity for various statistics.
This suit will from this day forward do anything just for you.
You have full control from the inside out to morph this body into a streamlined existence of Beauty.
A paintbrush of life. The most artistic expression of "Holy shit! This is the dopest game ever!"
Welcome to you.
The ultimate functioning symbiosis of water and dirt being propelled by fire and air...
the basic elements for all of our technology are making up that body you wear.
It can be taught to do magic. It can fly. It can heal.
Its so strong that you don't have to mule anything on someone else if you don't want to.
It will take anything that you throw at it and can come back fully just by your will.
It takes no learning to use but its hard to amass great skill.
A fully integrated system allows you to experience reality totally and completely should you feel.
It provides access to a puzzle that will confound the shit out of you...
Make you throw the controller over and over and always you'll come back again.
Basic considerations: Use it or lose it.
It grows with fresh experience. Remember that.
You will feel pain to know your fire of refinement is working well.
Joy will be your life support.
Throw maximum skill points into Gratitude and Giving. This when once high level will afford you to unlimited use of Life.
It will use EVERYTHING... time spent locked in spells and cells still provide you with the raw power of experience. Thus boosting your level unceasingly.
Ask and you shall have it.
Beware of your auto control!
Your memory system is meshed with your auto targeting so that your past is literally projected onto all five senses providing you with the ability to make highly predictive... almost instantaneous control of the future.
You don't know your available power without breathing.
It can carry you if you need it but don't let it auto control always. Its powerful ability to handle means it can consume itself.
Instead balance on the edge of Flow with balanced strokes of Art.
The rest is up to you.

First week in Sudan went something like this:

Mama!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Come get me!!!! heh heh. Do you ever have those moments where all the sudden you look around and the gravity of where you are sits on you like an elephant? ok ok... but have you had a day where that happens to you about 400 times? ok ok..but have you had a month where everyday was like that though?? Jeez this trip is wild! Well Im in Khartoum (I know..I have no idea where that is either!) which is the capital city of Sudan and is the spot where the Blue Nile from Ethiopia and the White Nile from Uganda meet to form The Nile that runs up to Egypt and into the sea below Greece.

So far my trip in Sudan has gone like this: I left Aswan, Egypt about 7 days or so ago on a ferry that sails south to Sudan. When Egypt made the High Dam on the Nile in the 70's they ended up flooding a huge part of the desert thus creating the largest man made lake on the planet. The ferry took about 20 hrs of sailing to arrive in Sudan. I slept on the deck of the boat under the stars. Wind wasnt too bad and the boat was much more chill than I thought it would be. Once in Sudan we pulled to port right outside a town called Wadi Halfa which basically looks like a temporary town thats permanetly there. The ferry was about 1 1/2 miles from the town so after the whole immigration process that took 8 hrs (literally) I started walking to the town to find a hotel. I put my hand in my pocket and of course... my money was gone. At this point I didnt know what to do but start laughing. This is gonna make a great movie was all I could think. I kept walking and ran into a bunch of travelers from random countries that I had met on the ferry standing in the middle of the desert talking to a couple of Germans headed in the opposite direction.

"Guess what?"
"What?"
"I just lost all my cash.
" HUH?!"
"Yea, I think I dropped it somehow while walking from the ferry."
"Oh jeez... um..why are you so calm?"

At this point we all walked to the town and the Germans said they would look on the ground on the way back. In town I dug around in my bag and found the cash you had given me in the card you wrote and a couple dollars I had stashed. All together was about $17 I think. This got me a little money for starters. I then decided to sell my cell phone (a cheap one I bought in Cairo) so now I had about $37 or almost 80 SUD. I figured I would just slowly sell my belongings as I traveled till I ended up back in Egypt with just my clothes and my passport. I checked into a cheap hotel (calling it a hotel is giving it too much credit) and got some dinner with the other travelers. Later that night the two Germans came back (a couple) and said they didnt find my money but they were gonna give me $250 and I could just pay them back when I get back to the states. They said based on their travels in Sudan that much should get me by if I was good with my spending. I hugged them both and then gave them the best info for Egypt (their first time there) and where to go for a great time. Who knew I have two German angels. I now had more cash then what I came with and lost. So far so good.

The next morning I went to immigration and payed the dues for being in the country and learned that the money I came with in the first place wasnt even enough to begin with. Feeling blessed is a common experience for me right now. I handled my paperwork and jumped a bus (again a liberal term for that vehicle) headed for the next town which was way into the desert along the Nile. Theres no paved roads in North Sudan so it was like bumping along on the surface of the moon for 8 hrs and my body was twisted up when we finally arrived in Abri. The town looked like a National Geographic special on mud houses. I stayed one nite in the hotel (even worse than the last one.. metal beds in stinky mud rooms and the common toilet was a hole in the ground backed up with you know what...). The next morning I woke to find I had missed the bus for the next town and there was no bus for another 4 days. Now at this point in my traveling career I know that whenever I arrive in a new and completely unknown place that the best thing for me to do is hole up somewhere alone, chill and catch my proverbial breath. So I went exploring and found an old mud house that was abandoned on the banks of the Nile. The house was falling apart but one room had a roof still and once I cleared the floor of human feces then it would be a great place to camp. There was fire wood nearby and the house was about 20 feet above the actual Nile waters. This meant no crocs could come in on me in the night. During the day the whole town was infested by swarms of gnats that bite so I spent the next 3 days in my tent during the day and chilling by the fire in the beautiful nights. So very peaceful. I had to be careful to avoid showing any of the locals where I was staying so they wouldnt get curious and bother me or mess with my stuff. This worked well for the first couple days but eventually one young guy found me and by the next day they were leading me to the police station to try and convince me to stay in the hotel (which was much worse than my camp site). The police ended up saying I was fine where I was but the next morning was the bus so I decided to pack up and stay in the hotel. They let me stay that last night for free.

The next morning had me on a "real bus" to Khartoum and 16 hrs later I arrived. Only the first half of the trip was on dirt roads this time. That was all yesterday. A big sand storm has hit Sudan for the past couple days so everything is super dusty. I arrived in Khartoum at 2 am where the bus dropped me in the middle of dusty nowhere. I started looking for a hotel and was turned away, ignored, misdirected, held at gunpoint by a police officer until he realized I was American and apologized, and randomly lost for about an hour. I finally stumbled upon a room that was in a rail yard. There was no people around and the room had a fan and a plug for my iPod. I was able to bar the door shut and lay out my sleeping pad. It was hot so the fan was nice. I woke up with a fat upper lip where the mosquito had a feast while I slept. I packed up and walked out into the stares. Im the least black person around. People here are BLACK. Like almost purple. Anywho, I had the name of a place where I could camp... so I found a bank, exchanged the rest of my cash and headed to the campsite. Now my tent is set up on the bank of the Blue Nile and after wandering around a bit I found this internet spot. Whew. What a week!

Imma try and link up with some expats who will let me stay on the couch for free (couchsurfing.com) for a few days then prolly head north again and see the little towns I skipped on the way to Khartoum before heading back to Egypt.I might be able to get a small boat and sail back towards Egypt on the Nile hopping from village to village. We'll see.
-J

PS.. The website was too expensive to maintain from here so purejustin.com is supposed to go straight to the blog. Im working on gettting it set up. The direct link to the blog is: purejustin.blogspot.com.

Some artwork Im playing with...