Practice

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden. It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ... Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Practice allows you to wake up.

Mandalay

*

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a calm velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.   

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Kilim

When I arrived in Marrakech at 3 a.m. flat #187 was “under construction.”

It was a cinderblock shell with three rooms, a squat toilet and small kitchen.

Howling Wolf, the word machine, had a table.

Everything was under construction in a country where eight hours seemed twenty-four and you became a minor character, director and audience in a film called, Beyond Wild With Beautiful Intensity. You adapt, adjust and evolve.

Hustlers shuffled strangers back and forth. They were the jugglers. I was the ball in the Marrakech souk.

A boy led me through a maze of narrow blind trash-filled alleys to the tanneries. He handed me off to a man who took me past workers standing in cement vats of urine and solvents cleaning leather skins and cisterns of multi-hued colors for dyeing. He shuffled me to Taib selling carpets.

“I have worked in the tanneries for thirty-seven years,” said the 47-year-old purveyor of kilim carpets in his showroom overlooking the vats. “We start at 5 a.m. and work to dusk.”

He described the workmanship of a silk kilim as staff unrolled carpet after carpet. Intricate blends were reds, oranges, blues, and greens.

“These are made by Berbers 1400 kilometers to the south. They bring them here and we trade them leather. The silk comes from Mali, South Africa and Europe. Every kilim tells a happening-story.”

Small ones sold for $150, 4x6 carpets ran $300. “We take all credit cards and of course cash.”

His salesmen herded French tourists into an adjacent room for a sales pitch.

“I don’t sell in the souk,” he said. “The taxes are too high and they pass the extra cost onto the tourist.”

After Taib the tannery guide expected something for his troubles.

The boy appeared from shadows with his hand out.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Coast Starlight

Singing field holler Clarksdale blues, “Don’t cha know no’thin child?” I channel Elmore James and Robert Johnson by living, learning, laughing and loving.

Standing with my heart in bleeding hands down at the crossroads I traded my soul to the devil to play the blues.

Train whistles blew.

Above platform #5 long neck cranes flew west over Puget Sound.

“ALL ABOARD,” yelled porter Jon. I got on, the door closed and the Coast Starlight slid south.

“This is where you sleep. Upstairs is the observation car. They serve a continental breakfast at 10. Meals are included in your fare. You will be asked if you want the early or late dinner seating in the dining car.”

Train #11 rolled south along the Pacific Coast toward a railroad museum in Sacramento. Historical engines, freight cars, silver diners and big black coal stoking locomotives collected dust.

Construction maps, massive oil murals and Andrew Russell paintings of exhausted immigrants and eastern big shots in tuxedos.

15,000 Chinese workers laid 700 miles of track from Sack-of-Tomatoes to Promise Me A Story, Utah. They shoveled twenty pounds of rocks 400 times a day. 1,000 Chinese died hammering transportation rails. The Chinese built the West, Mormons the middle and Irish the East. The last spike in 1869 connected East-West railroads.

Travelers in the dome liner discussed characters. “He’s three French fries short of a happy meal,” said a Las Vegas nutrition teacher, pointing at a man.

“Eat fruits and veggies to reduce internal temperature for healthy results,” said CC, a doctor from central Mexico. We exchanged books about Eastern spiritual warriors.

CC read my palm lines. “You will come back as a bird, not a snake.”

“I am a screaming eagle.”

Her nails were perfect. “You have a long lifeline.” 

“What do you see?”

“Your fate line indicates either a strong profession chosen by self or higher spirit. You have a strong will and there is conflict with a hidden self in your dreams.”

“I am a higher spirit.”

“The girdle of Venus indicates promiscuity. You have protection. A deep heart line shows a heavy first love. Other deep lines show lots of anger and resentment.”

I nodded. “An early life of confusion, separation, loss, and fear of emotional trust. Abandonment. Orphan heart awareness. Alcohol played a later role with manipulation and trust.”

“You had a lot of turmoil in early life and had to overcome a struggle and nourishment issues.”

“True. My mother contracted polio when I was five. I felt abandoned. It wasn’t my fault however I felt guilty. She had my brother then a sister. I was angry coping with the responsibility, emotional distance and siblings. She became angry and abusive. She died at forty-two. I escaped the house, hitched the country, survived Vietnam and explored the planet.” 

“I see. You are a sucker for love but not a pushover. You are generous and not concerned about money. The height of your little finger indicates a high level of creativity.”

“What you say may not be real but it’s true. Or it’s not true and real. I’m working on detachment and discernment with clarity. You’re very good.”

“Thanks,” she said, smiling. “I don’t do many hands anymore, but I like you.”

Miles of rails tracking open land said hello big world. Spikes lay coast to coast. Labor. Rosie the Riveter sang her song.

“Rosie” was Rose Will Monroe, a riveter on B-29 and B-24 military planes at a Michigan production plant in WW II. She was selected by the War Department for patriotic promotional films portraying a rosy-cheeked woman in overalls working outside the home. Her image was accepted by millions of women and she was credited, according to statistics of American Economic History, with increasing the number of employed women to twenty million in four years.

Named “Rosie” by her male co-workers, she symbolized women on assembly lines in defense industry jobs producing military hardware. After the war Rose drove a taxi, opened a beauty shop and started an Indiana construction company named Rose Builders. She died in 1997 of natural causes.

Rail music sang click, clack, click and clack.

In a dome liner, children ate watermelon and spit seeds into sky. A red haired female magician made poverty disappear. Passengers formed quick intense transient relationships between whistle stops before, during and after industrial wastelands.

We zoomed past small town wrecking yards with cars and trucks collecting rust, abandoned swings, toys, dishwashers, gardens, guillotines, baskets of severed heads, shredded tires and water soaked concave fences collapsing into community soil.

I hammered word spikes while waving to strangers stranded in their present perfect tense seeing trains carry perfect continuous tense strangers into new futures. Down the line riding the rails. Further along the road of iron deficiencies.

At a remote train station a furious man with his shopping cart home and a whiskey bottle in a bag sagged against a brick wall yelling at his slumped wife. Her old sad eyes stared far away wondering how she managed to get herself in this fucking mess away from social services, respect, dignity and love. Her heart knew if she had any common sense any strength or power she’d get up and start walking.

Her dilemma was to find a way out of the quicksand swallowing her life. She was conditioned to having someone save her. She loved being a victim and needed a martyr.

Downstairs in a converted baggage car I met a 15-year old kid going home.

“Man,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe it. I’m from Chicago, the east side, ya know, projects and all that shit and just spent the summer with relatives in Sacramento. Would you believe there are no pregnant girls out there? No guns either. Back where I’m from everybody’s pregnant and you’d better get your ass through the projects after school and home right quick or else somebody’s gonna shoot ya. My poor mom is worried sick every time I leave our place.”

He smokes, pacing the cage talking up a storm.

“Yeah, man, like I go out at night in Sacramento with friends and there were no gangs at all. People were real nice. I couldn't believe it. I’m moving back out there as soon as possible, man. I’m gonna finish school and get out of the projects. Man, I’m telling ya, I learned a lot out there. It’s all about friends and family.”

A wild deep river dancing under a full moon illuminated the boy’s silver shadow.

Passengers in a rolling living room talked about Richmond, Chicago, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and New Orleans. “Wherever this train takes us,” said a man. A retired couple from Philly saw wild Montana after thirty years in Freedom City where he worked underground connecting subconscious wires to the grid.

Clear cold thin Rocky Mountain air quickened blood streams. We’ve enjoyed rail’s clicking clacking trestle music exchanging laughter and awareness. Visions of starlight sky blends with engine headlights shattering blackness. We arrive at Union Station in Denver.

I know the field behind the station where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives.

It’s a tricky place at night. It runs north way up to the stockyards near the old Coliseum, not to be confused with the one in Rome where they fed you-know-who to you-know-what. Where every cold frostbitten February, cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockman’s extravaganza awarding prizes to animals and the field runs south past the main Post Office Terminal annex and westward toward immigrant hopes and dreams up to Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline. The killing field is filled with tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.

There’s a fine view of the Rocky Mountains from the field amid random acts of pre-meditated violence around small fires as drifters pray to stay invisible long enough to ride rails out of town away from the mean old street.

In the summer, children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens up on 38th and Tennyson where my aunt and uncle ran a drugstore and pharmacy after WWII. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for a thing. My aunt was so scarred by the Depression she maintained thirty-seven folders budgeting the cash flow by counting every penny every night.

It ain’t no field of dreams in that big lonely weed choked undeveloped tract of real estate where freights and Amtrak dome liners blow long sad whistles as buttoned waiters serve blood red Colorado tenderloin down wind from the smell of meat grilling at Coors Field where boys of summer play hardball.

The Coast Starlight sliding toward Kansas curves into a space-time bend.

Moon drinks rainwater.

Walking rails I sing with Robert Johnson…“Woke up this morning and looked around for my shoes…I got them walking blues.”

I savor impermanence. Cool blood decorates hot black keys as I bleed words.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Blues Music

Kids banging on piss pots, chair spokes and life support systems gave the harp player a backbeat. They had lyrics down.

“Blues are a healer.”

“The blues ain’t nothing but a good woman feeling bad.”

“Let’s invent the future,” said one. “The day after tomorrow belongs to me. Know any Little Walter? I love Juke.”

“Sure do,” said the player. “Let’s have a look see at our repertoire. How about some Sonny Boy? His real name was Chester Burnett, born in Mississippi, down in the Delta. Have you heard Help Me? It’s a classic. He sang, ‘If you don’t help me I’m going to have find me somebody else.’ He had the blues with a feeling. Speaking of healers, my mom does vision quests. Helps people see their way through personal dark slime and muck. She makes womb lodges. People go in there. Can you imagine, going back into the womb? Dark and spooky floating in wet stuff. You can’t see a thing. It’s scary and cool. She says it allows people to process old grief and memories. She calls it regressing. It takes a lot out of her.”

“It’s like entering a cave,” said Tran. “I heard about amazing Paleolithic paintings in Benaojan, Spain near Ronda. They are really old stone stories of 26,000-year old bison, archers, deer, fish traps and sex stuff. I met a wandering ghostwriter named Omar in Morocco after 9/11 and…”

“Probably metaphorical,” said an abstract kid. “They used their imagination and daily struggle to survive. They created internal and external dream images and stories. It’s all about survival, meaning and metaphor. A cave. A womb. Birth. Life. Death. Transformation.”

“Yeah, they painted their experiences. They weren’t dreams silly. They were real. They were hunters-gathers like us. They shared visions and story-truth with family, clan and tribe. They created honest magical creation stories. They expanded the known and unknown in their universe.”

“Oh yeah?” said a skeptic. “I mean where’s the scientific proof? Scientists will never reconcile the two abstract theories into a unified field theory of the universe, matter, anti-matter and evolutionary hypothesis with Time & Being & Nothingness.”

“I heard scientists dated them.”

“When you get that old no one will date you.”

Blues harp music echoed through the ward. “Who wrote that?” said one.

“Willie Dixon. He wrote some great music. Everybody recorded his tunes. Stones, Muddy Waters, you name it. The guys at Chess Records jerked him around big time. Talk about paying your dues.”

“If you want to play you have to pay.”

“Did he mate at Chess or was he a figure of speech like a metaphor?” said a linguistic kid. “Sound check.”

“He was a lyricist,” said the blues player, “and he also played the bass.”

“I know the words but forgot the music.”

“Music is the fuel,” said harp dude.

ART