Chinese kids Take the stairs

Greetings,

Yes, it's true, this passionate desire for pressure to pass exams in Chinese schools resulted in millions of children dying today in a stampede to escape their teachers after evening class. Stare at the stairs. 

-It was raining, said the authorities. Blame the rain.

-The rain had nothing to do with it, said a survivor, age 10. It was a death trap.

Chinese educational tools.

The provincial education party leader was fired. The principal of the school was fired. The parents of dead children can't do a thing because they are willing victims of the system. They have absolutely no power. How can the system fire parents? They have no idea how we run the institution. We brainwash the students and their parents.

-Mandatory study from 6:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week, said the system.

-This is your DUTY as parents, said the system.

-As students, your DUTY is to pass the exams. 60 is heaven. 59 is hell. Learning is secondary. 

-We have developed safe and secure schools for your children, said the system. Look at our safety record. Look at the substandard construction materials and cost-cutting measures we have implemented to save money. Look at the bribery and corruption we've developed and nurtured to manipulate everyone from the bottom to to the top to create the finest, safest educational facilities in the entire world. We pay everyone off. 

-As you know from our long history the value of human life is worthless, said the system.

-Our rigid educational safety standards includes spotless bathrooms, elaborate fancy sports halls where students are required to sing silly patriotic songs about the motherland, dining halls where they eat the same mass produced rice and stringy green soggy vegetables day after day, dorm rooms where we pack 8-10 students into rat cages, an empty useless library and lots of slippery tiled stairs which, in the event of a fire, panic, epidemic, plague, tornado, hurricane, typhoon, and earthquakes - remember Sichuan and the shoddy buildings that killed 8,000 kids - become death traps. 

If you protest the death of your child because of our negligence we will:

1. evict you from your home
2. remove you from your plush paper pushing bureaucratic job
3. send you to a re-education labor camp on another planet
4. make you pay a fine
5. hunt you down

Your teacher loves you.

The school, to prevent disorder and broken social harmony by distraught parents grieving over the unfortunate and unforeseen death of their young children, will hold a one minute of silence memorial tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. in honor of our loyal and patriotic students who perished in the latest tragedy in their pursuit of good grades and academic excellence.

May their untimely death serve as a reminder to all of us to remain vigilant and steadfast in our common purpose of command and control procedures.

Thank you for your attention. 

Metta.

Myth's Mask

Shaman's mask, Vietnam.

Greetings,

People here love to look back. It is a passion. It is a genetic molecule of fear, doubt and uncertainty. Perhaps also just a plain childish innocent curiosity of wanting the past, needing.

Yes. Focus on needs, not wants. Needs manifesting their desire. A desire for a ghost. We are all passing through. 

They look back to see if they see, yes, in their vivid reptilian imagination a ghost. Their ghost. A ghost from a family, friend, lost. Looking for clues at their personal ground zero. 

They've arrived from distant galaxies. Human habitation sites were discovered here 500,000 years ago. Primitive agriculture began 7,000 years ago. A. Go. 

So it figures, accepting an evolutionary premise, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance today. 

I live in talking monkey zones. They eat rice. They drink water. They wash one set of clothing and hang it out to dry on poles. They burn down the forest. They harvest brooms. Their shamans bring rain. Tropical downpours allow people the luxury to wash cars. 

They use their faint star energy to look, not really seeing, behind them wondering, all the wondering. 

Food is cheap here. Medicine and education is expensive. This has nothing to do with simians. It has nothing to do with the two women sitting in a dark neighborhood food joint. Plastic chairs faces a tall cinder block wall. Chickens, goats and cats prowl, peck and forage through garbage and dreams.

One woman sits quietly in a deep meditation. Her friend parts her hair gently, looking for minute insects, cleaning her scalp. They take turns cleaning and inspecting. This genetic behavior is being repeated in zoos, jungles, and rain forests.

Chattering oral story tellers play Bronze Age drums, pounding out 3rd century tunes.

Healing the people with music.

Males wash their little toy machines. They study the accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. They play chess along the road waiting for passengers. People eat spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies, and green and red chillies.

One human creates a brave new world. Forging new futures with a patriotic purpose. An assessment on process in a data based star cluster.

Dream mask mirror and swimming...

She showed me how to swim with gigantic sea turtles and practice sitting.

How to dive deep exploring coral and amazing underwater life forms. How to explore below the surface of appearances.

Experiencing the Temple of Complete Reality on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan once upon a time. Climbing through primal forests with young mature smart Mountain-Nature Girl. She lives in the mountain. Some live below. Others live on. She lives in. She knows every herb, plant, flower, tree, river and medicinal process in the forest.

Mountain-Nature girl with Vivian.

How the heartbeat was an eternal rhythm.

Then we were going up. Now we are going down.

How to breath through a mask. "What kind of mask? Is it hand carved from the wood of tribal memories?" I asked her. 

"Yes," she said, "it is a manifestation of long lost symbols, a primitive culture. It is a shamanic ritual, a dance trance. When you put on the mask you become the thing you fear the most, your basic human nature."

"Does this mean I will evolve into a being filled with the ability to scheme and deceive?"

"Perhaps. This is a highly evolved trait of human intelligence. Do you remember what you wrote about J. Joyce, how he went into exile with silence and cunning?"

"Yes. He knew how to put seven little words in order. He was a cunning linguist."

"Well, this ability to scheme and deceive is your cunning, your instinctual learned behavior. It separates you from less evolved life forms like apes, plankton and sea enemies-anemone (fish eating animals) and androgynous androids in the deep subconscious."

"Are you a clown fish?"

"Look in your dream mask mirror."

Play your drum music.

Metta.

Clean your ears day

Greetings,

Today and everyday is International Clean Your Ears Day.

It's a big deal considering ears are so small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time I had my ears physically deep cleaned was in China. A woman at the empty opera place in Chengdu one Saturday morning. I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were clean and disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax, cotton swabs soaked in liquid. I wrote about it in 2004.

It's a great feeling. BUZZ!

WHAT?

Today was another opportunity to get the old ears cleaned. Bliss baby.

I've located a street barber here in Saigon. He's on the corner of Noise & Confusion, a main drag through the heart of a swirling mass of mobile humanity. Beep-beep.

His place is an example of real bare bones marketplace essentials. He has a very small corner of a cement area surrounded by a wire fence with a gap on the sidewalk. One old comfortable broken barber chair, a lopsided table with a mirror. On the table are his ancient well used tools; blades in cheap paper, electric trimmer, a straight razor, comb, and brush.

Cut black hair spills out of a green plastic bag near the gutter waiting for someone to collect and recycle it. Makes good stuffing. 

The aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed this debris and clutter:

1. cycle of cycles
2. incessant trajectory of love and passion
3. bird songs
4. laughing children
5. crying, whining, screaming children (many over 25)
6. heart broken lovers
7. distraught wandering tourists
8. dancing fools (you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance)
9. distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels
10. minstrels
11. singers, dancers, hustlers
12. motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, wage slaves
13. laughing slaves
14. lonely philistine Filipinos in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather and shoes and jewellery on sale at discount stores
15. bored frustrated wives and their husbands
16. unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, homeless, and orphans
17. fortune tellers and assorted prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations and clear intentions
18. nutritional experts and particle collider scientists
19. visions of a supreme creator laughing at all of us
20. people who say, "I don't have a hearing problem. I have a listening problem." 
21. your choice. All for $2.77.

What? Open ears, open mind.

Metta.

Fat and Happy

Man works metal.

Greetings,

(Editor's Note: This was originally published in A Century Is Nothing and in Novel Excerpts.)

On September 1, 2001 he was wedged next to the window of a puddle jumper flying over the Cascade mountains.

Next to him were an overweight happy couple in economy anticipating their future first class flight to London out of Georgia. Days before people on, from and inside cells placed long distance calls from the edge of caves.

“We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends,” said the wife, “and then,” her husband chimed in, “we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food.”

She wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh and their combined girth was sweet consumption. They exceeded their weight limit. The scales of justice were balanced in their favor as they spilled wealth.

“What do you do for a living?” her husband asked.

“My friends call me Mr. Point. I work for The Department of Wandering Ghosts Ink. 24/7,” he said with a straight face. He was a survivor, Vietnam 1969.

“Busy, busy, busy,” he laughed. “Yes, I am a mercenary of love, an unemployed fortune teller if you must really know. You might remember me from the Academy of Pain and Anger Management if you have a need to know. The more you know the less you need. If your top secret security clearances are valid.

“I’m heading to North Africa to meet my female nomad lover and various strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the extraordinary rendition program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer terrorism suspects to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fictious companies.

“If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they start boiling them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap music 24 hours a day to drive them crazy. Stale bread and rancid water. A grisly business, but hey, it’s a paycheck.

“We also set up off shore accounts for clandestine agencies, or fronts if you will. We collect raw opium in Afghanistan, process it in Asian labs so street addicts get their fix. Along the way we collect internal organs to sell in Hong Kong. The market is diversifying. Pick em’ up and lay em’ down. No women or kids. We have to draw the line somewhere, eh?

“Business has never been better. Ain’t nothin but the blues baby.”

They cut him off after this truth. His one-way air ticket to Morocco and Spain; another village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic realities and fewer intrusions on his sanity. The KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, principle. Just leaving was a wise decision as it turned out. Speaking of hiss-tree.

“Beyond, beyond the great beyond,” he’d whispered to someone when they asked him where was he going and why did he do what he did with the who, when and howdy doody yankee doodle dandy stick a feather in your cap crap paradigms.

Metta.

Chinese street food in a hard cold cruel world where life is short, brutal and nasty.

MK 84

Greetings,

Good evening Saigon and the streets are filled with beggars, moto-hustlers, hookers, shoeshine kids, single mothers with babies wrapped tight, sunglass salesman, newspaper vendors, yakking cell yellers, DVD's, nail clippers, perfumes, snacks, and women selling everything but their skin because men are greedy. Not to mention motorcycle parking security dudes and lost, dazed, overweight bored European tourists.

Life on Saigon sidewalks.

MK 84 for your ears....

Metta.