Sapa Theatre

Greetings,

 All the tears, rivers of loss. Introspection.

 Now here below mist mountain market. Java. The Vietnamese tourists pulling around their weekend rolling suitcase carts. They are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance with  strangers, and buy cheap Chinese plastic products. 

They are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts, and lost eyes.

They run to stand in front of the Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore the local girls. A woman slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at a H’mong girl’s offerings; a handmade belt, a think colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than the girl.

Once the the woman slows down she is surrounded.

A chorus of voices, “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!”

The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers. Watches, cheap imitations, pants, shirts, knickknacks. 

The eyes of youth scanning 6:05 a.m. Elements - elaborate colors and fabrics. Threads. Threads.

Street theatre.

Red tied school kids in uniformed mass hysteria, deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow school building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs dogs hump on the street in front of the stoned church where tourists gather for a photo shoot. Local Vietnamese women selling this market are armed with camera bags poke and prod the women, husbands, boys and girls, lost and found into manageable groups for the moment. The moment they will remember forever. The moment framed on their family alternative votive candle flaming, this moment. Caught in time. Frozen alive! 

Here we are, she said to her friends later. Look. A church. I am in front of it.

A blond European tourist wearing rubber flip flops walks past the scene. Her t-shirt says, “Love My Bones.” I wonder if she is a specialist in marrow transplants.

I am smiling at every stranger along life’s magical story time inside the heavy forested, along steep stone trails. Yellow wildflowers fill the fields where water buffalo graze.

So there I was at 6:16 a.m. as the V tourists poured into Sapa. They poured off the bus, wearing red cotton baseball hats designed for the Great Union Hotel. It sprawls across green hills above the church. A fore lorn bunch of exotic creatures. They travel in bunches, like bananas. 

The economy class of style, luxury, and pizzazz-a-lama and the H’mong were already hard at work - pushing their handicrafts. These ebony, black spinning colors, all the hand made rainbows, skirts, aprons, blue-black tribes, flowering ethnology. Derivations. 

Metta.

Life > Logic

Greetings,

Lover of numbers, mathematics, and logical contradictions. Life is a paradox. We are a metaphor. How's it feel to be a metaphor, contemplating perception and sensation? Are we overwhelmed by the perceptual data flow?

Look around. You'll see, observe many humans completely insane with their perceptual overload. Their hard wired receivers are overloaded with INCOMING data. It's scary, downright frightening. Pure fear.

Zombies and automatons. Willing slaves to their personally created hell on earth. Their want. Their perpetual state of being distracted. It's all they know, this life of distractions. 

I'm having coffee yesterday with a very intelligent friend. We hadn't seen each other for six weeks. She kept pulling her cell out of her pocket. Reading the screen. Texting someone. Out there. I didn't say a word. I stopped talking when she did this. I just observed her behavior. She never said, "Excuse me." 

Must be really important I figured.

Can you imagine how she may have felt if, during our short time together I said, "Excuse me but you are really boring me. I can't stand it. I need to text someone. I need to use my phone to connect with someone who is not here but I really wish they were because you are boring me."

Text me baby. Tell me about your situation. Your sweet distraction. Text me your insecurity and loneliness. 

Speaking of scary, what's scary is seeing all the crazy Ha Noi motorcycle drivers texting while they zoom along narrow crowded streets in heavy traffic. Talk about a logical death wish. 

Text this: Meditate on the complete cessation of your perception. Of your sensation. Poof! You disappear into bliss. No time, no boundaries.

Maybe it's not the answers we need to ask but the questions we need to know. All this.

"If you don’t know much about infinity, for instance, you are invited to check in to “Hilbert’s Hotel” — which, with its infinite number of rooms, can miraculously accommodate additional guests even when it’s completely full."

LOGICOMIX

Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou. 

Illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna

Read more...

It all adds up.

Metta.

Out of Ha Noi train station

Now that I am back I begin at the beginning. A good place to start. I'm not one of those travelers running into guesthouses or hotels to get ON LINE! to post daily. I slow down. I make notes and art in my Moleskine. I doodle. Computers are useless. They only give you answers. I make images. I spend quality time with people I meet along the way. Everyone is an artist.

After returning to my base, I sift through notes, upload images and create a minor masterpiece. So it goes.

I left on the 9th. At the train station near tracks I passed the "Free W.C. House," yes, a free W.C. With WiFi? Electronic crap-a-rama. Go with the flow. Delete from system.

It felt great to put on the pack, walk through the narrow lanes (a la China) get to the street, get a bike, get to the station early, get some green tea, get to platform #7 between trains, get a sleeping berth in a room for four. Riding the rails, this rhythm. Comfortable mid-week - no humanity crush. 

Yes, this pack, the weight and these steps in old Timberland walking shoes bought in Ankara in the fall of 2007. Since then plenty of terrain in comfort; Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam; Ha Noi, Hue, Hoi An and now destined for Sapa, mountains, trails, rocks, water and good dirt leaving footprints on Earth's surface.

It's a walking meditation. All this rapturous joy. This synthesis of love.

Metta. 

Walking home through the maze. She's had along day. Selling.

Passage tell-e-vision

Yes, this is the Truth channel. Do not attempt to adjust your set. Eyeballs perhaps but not the set. Game, set, match. You will be happy to know that television continues to dumb down the population around the planet.

For example, I was walking through the very narrow concrete passageway either to or from the street of dreams where I eat with construction workers, and allow Jasmine to develop confidence with her English for an hour as impatient motorcycle people hurrying home beep-beep-beep negotiating a thin street filled with kids, elderly walkers, young exercise addicts going or coming from the park across from clogged streets,

women carrying bamboo baskets filled with vegetables, bricks, recycled steel, bread and dreams mixed with residents sitting on tiny plastic kindergarten chairs crowding home/store fronts, drinking beer, peeling, peeing, cooking, eating, in brief - living

inside the narrow as I passed numerous open portal homes made of sliding accordion gates nestling motorcycles in the front room, I saw and heard vast volumed images flickering their phosphorescence, their

marketing and economic messages into brain faces of kids, parents, grandparents and ancestors. An old women sat slumped against a door frame staring at the box. She hasn't seen the sky for years. If she looks left and up she can see a slight sliver shiver. That's it.

Let's eat! Let's watch TV! Give me your consciousness. Everyone is happy. Life is good.

Metta.

Authorized to speak truth

According to me, speaking on the condition of anonymity because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

1. truth is classified. The source of truth concerning Everything is classified. Ossified.

Yes, I am authorized to say, with complete anonymity that truth is filtered, it is compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified. It hides inside a deeply buried locked black box. The key is classified. The key is not on a social network site designed to distract.

The key is, for the Time Being, a woman somewhere in India carrying the world on her back. She's the key. 

2. truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke. The big joke, the laugh track. Your tears speak streak truth, mangling truth.

3. truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia well said, (he was authorized to speak) - "Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides." 

4. truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source.

5. truth will provide more than 1 billion people with access to safe drinking water.

6. truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people worldwide who cannot read. Woman are 2/3 of this number.

7. truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day. Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

8. truth will assist 70% of the people in the "developing" world having no access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools.

Truth is a fatal disease, like love. A sledgehammer.

Metta.