Selling the Mandala Game

Holland, Amsterdam,
26 June 2010.

With the sun doing its best trying to get the inhabitants of Mother Earth happy and the summer queue at the Anne Frank House slowly reaching its peak, long hours of waiting in the endless seeming line of people to see the Achterhuis with the Dutch summer sun blaring away on the heads of our foreign visitors, my little one-man Mandala business is reaching its peak too...

It is the time of the year when I feel like making and selling the Mandala game has completely taken over my life, blotted-out memories that came to my conscience during a bad night's sleep these last few months are replaced by day time flashbacks of all the places in this world where I used to make money the Mandala way...back to Las Ramblas in Barcelona while staying at the local Hospitaje de Juventud, making the games in their comunity room at night and selling them during the day at Las Ramblas...

Back to the Khao Sarn tourist district in Krung Thep where I used to sell and make them behind the Wat, getting free food from the monks, getting tranquil and melacholy in a polluted, crowded third world capital that is full to overflow with motor vehicles and motorbike taxis but where the Temple complex grounds where my private domain...selling and making games on Pattaya's boulevard where the Hot Mommas would keep me company and would rush across busy Beach Road to buy cold to the touch Leo beer to help pass the time more comfortably...

Selling games at the Fishrman's Warf in San Franscisco after my big bicycle trip in California...

Selling games in London during my shorttime affair with English Rose, my relatively short-lived contact with Andrea in Kassel or equally short Intermezzo with Christine
in München, Paris with Colombian Patricia...lets suffice to say that the list of foreign cities where I sold my games while being on romantic visits to various girlfriends is pretty long....

for nearly 25 years these games followed me across the globe, during my long and sometimes arduous backpack trips across and through quite a few countries, bringing me the dough to pay for dumphouse hotels, a fistfull of tatty and dirty local bank notes to keep the local ladies happy and me bodily satisfied...

In the end I`m always finding myself back on my Giant mountain bike on the way to the Anne Frank House, my little Mandala suitcase full with my Mandala making equipment, a few drinks and lunch, my sketchbook, ready to make more Dinero, hard earned D'argent so necesary for my chaotic and alcohol and drug ruled excistence, so much needed to buy friendship and physical contact from these poor creatures of the night that at times seem to possess my life just as much as these funny little games do...

... a lonely male on the wrong side of his forties who had the dubious luck of finding a simple but provitable way to make dough on the side and who would have otherwise ended up a hopeless drunk, a druggie from the street living on the dole and spending most of his summers in the park boozing with his equally hopeless mates...