Pay the price

I never take yes for an answer.

What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

*

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Chengdu. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion orators

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance

Vientiane, Laos

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your Mind-At-Large, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia, V2

Yangon, Burma

Freak Show

Gonzo journalism. Creative nonfiction. Jazz prose poetry.

Life experience. System analysis and social autopsy.

Genius kid friends are storytellers.

This is a flawed masterpiece.

Everything you need to know is in this book.

*

... Write about that unpleasant fact, said the literary agent. Literate types want something to read while stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their mundane superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Life happens where sheep feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s an adventure.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret and exhausted by their monkey mind where it is very comfortable … They absorb static or moving pictures to escape their terminal condition needing electronic reality and soft machine material…They burn out brain cells staring at little screaming screens … Cheap effective pervasive advertising permeates their consciousness speaking of Faust and making a deal … Dying is a grim comic business … It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

There’s nothing more expensive than poverty.

Ask Grave Digger about plot development, said Rita, Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear the future. Not me! Why me? The ego loves the CIRCUS of daily distractions … it wears them down … they become lethargic, depressed, suicidal, lazy and so on… lazy people never kill themselves.

They die of boredom, alienation, loneliness and neglect. Fate and Death conversed, I’m a funny thing, said Fate. Yes, you are said Death.

Healthy individuals respect the monkey mind. They are present now. They meditate. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. Sheep don’t read being lazy to face their fears with courage and honesty to learn their truths. Brave ones ask why exploring flow with their microscopic pure energy … A bag of bones … Atoms … WE are pure light.

Everything is energy, frequency and vibrations.

Many are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level. They want fast food and a remote to operate their 46-inch plasma screen with 500 channels … They eat their phone … They enjoy simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest … They want happy endings like orgasms. Got it?

Keep it simple stupid. KISS. Experiment with dirty realism. Give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities.

            Don’t write about what you know.

            Write about what you need to know, write to find out.

“The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” - Nin

Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover, an old idea with shiny tin foil packaging like a love sock named OK condom. Write about a decisive moment, like the condemned guy stepping around a puddle on his way to the gallows in Burma.

The Savage Detectives by Bolano is about poets searching for a lost Chilean poet in Europe, another quest to consider. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end, one more unpleasant fact about publishing and life. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher.

Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors leave or die laughing. New editors read the work. Maybe the first editor helped us. Maybe a new editor thinks it's garbage needing a major rewrite, revisions, deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations.

If so, a narrative HOOK leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it? Yes, said Zeynep, Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no values, morals or principles?

It’s all about money honey, said agent XYZ, And eyeballs … everything has a price, a user and exchange value in the world market of ideas, weapons, drugs and humans…don’t give me any philosophical arguments.

You’ve been very helpful. What a great saga, said Zeynep, Now let my storyteller friends and an omniscient blind scripter show the tale. Yes. It’s all yours. I have one question, said lit agent, how long have you been here? All fucking day, said Zeynep  ... Here’s your ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth.

Book of Amnesia V1

Feed Baby Blues

Trickster ... authentic aesthetic bliss.

Magic yellow jacket visits / hovering / inspecting / curious / explores near table / darts in / out / we communicate  / hi / hello / welcome / away

Nature's fragile ephemeral beauty

Silent singing

Wing free light fire spirit

Djehuti (Thoth) - Egyptian god of writing, moon, wisdom, science, magic, art

Imagination & precision - poetry, painting, photography

Death Worship by River

Rumors of intelligent life in Hanoi is an exaggeration, said Leo. Rumor control reports existence.

Take my neighbors Sam and Dave for example, said Tran, Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. Their names and roles are interchangeable. These are not Viet names. If they were, they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone take care of them in old age when they are lying or dying on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 wafting kitchen smells.

It’s an Asian thing. It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $50,000. Cash or no deal. Virgins have high value in the marriage market. They are have been sequestered behind fear and insecure superstitions and trapped by hovering in-laws and outlaws for centuries.

Marriage is legalized prostitution.  

Father knows best. You don’t marry the girl in Asia. You marry the family.

Cash gives them security. You pay and get the girl. The fun begins. Grandparents need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young pregnancy is always the only option. The tyranny of motherhood.  

Accelerate production comrade. Many procreating humans have more desire thinking about providing offspring for their security than the physical pleasure of sex. So it goes.

Sex is a DUTY. It ain’t about pleasure. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. Get on. Go for the ride. E jack U late. There are 90 million hard and fast parenthood rules according to the popular Vietnamese Party book, Produce & Consume. Get married early erotic pressure is on and off, on and off. Savior a small death in 8 seconds.

You do not want to be unmarried, sad, lonely and forgotten. Loss of face and shame haunts singles with vengeance. Fear of loneliness increases the possibility and probability of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a socialist society. They’ve taken their hormonal cues and social control systems from Uncle China.

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Sapa females in the NW, a future fragment of this tale, illustrate the value and necessity for rural girls to marry at the ripe old age of sixteen and produce genetic replicants. Petri dish. More Y chromosomes. It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

            Humans crave less suffering and neglect and more love.

Dave’s voice releases anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off cold molten gray interior Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall? His life is one long cold cement wall.

Echoes dance through his brain like sugarplum fairies. He knows the echo because he made the WALLS. He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement.

He slathered it over red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire to create a work of realist art lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama programs about life next door where the family sits on red rose cold tile floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies ... slurping from cracked bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost desperate mouths and yelling over each other in tonal decibels ... competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations, palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland ... with a double bladed axe singing a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with peasants as small players.

            Everyone’s being played.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Blindness

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."

- Upanishad

 

Curious beginnings determine her artistic sense of formless form, coloring stories of her village, the other world.

Cutting, planting, harvesting completes slow rhythm of life. Her skill shines with every new expression. Her heart sings.

Her simple direct feeling is all sensation.

Art enables her this beauty. She describes what she draws. She creates what she sees. Her words fly through forests with resplendent peacocks, birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line. Turn a blind eye.

Blindness listened. Blindness heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

Blindness danced through late yellow faltering light / penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts.

A bike bell rang. A young Lao girl sat quiet watching the Vietnamese girl do her toenails. Cutting, and trimming, lemon / lime soak, cuticles, translucent before applying a silver hued glossy glean. Nail by nail.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight crying tears of silence.

A van labeled UNIVERSE filled with blank faced white Europeans trapped behind glass holding rampant desires and scared expectations on laps turned into a blind alley.

They fidgeted with uncomfortable languages floating into ear canals assaulting long painful strides navigating yesterday’s regrets / tomorrow’s fear / today’s dead lines.

Blindness practiced Tai-chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged blue ink for a dark shade of green.

A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered empty secrets.

Elements of silence said farewell.

Eyes investigated decompression while swallowing fresh yogurt with peach slices near afternoon’s languishing empty promises intent on making it new day by day.

Explanations have to end somewhere.

In her village, the other world, the one she never left, Blindness threaded new beginnings on her loom of time feeling pressure and tightness between notes.

Sunlight dressed saliva beads blending a weave, texture and design, saying hello Beauty.

Beauty has no tongue.

Weaving A Life V1