Omar's Daughter

Omar remembered his daughter in Cadiz.

Faith worked at Mandarin Duck selling paper and writing instruments. She practiced a calm stationary way.

“May I help you,” she said one morning, greeting a bearded forcestero. Their eyes connected loneliness minus words. She averted her eyes. He was looking for pain free intimacy and ink.

“I’d like a refill for this,” he said, unscrewing a purple cloud-writing instrument with a white peak.

Recognizing the Swiss rollerball writing tool she opened a cabinet filled with boxes of cartridges.

“Fine or medium?”

“Hmm, lets try both.”

“One box of each?” she said.

“Yes please. I don’t want to run dry in the middle of a simple true sentence.”

“I agree. There’s nothing more challenging than running empty while taking a line for a walk,” she said.

“Isn’t that the truth? Why run when you can walk? Are you a writer?”

“Isn’t everyone? I love writing, sketching, painting, drawing, watercolors moistly,” she said.

“Moistly?”

“I wet the paper first. It saturate colors with natural vibrancy,” she said.

“With tears of joy or tears of sadness?”

“Depends on the sensation and the intensity of my feeling. What’s the difference? Tears are still tears in the rain. The heart is a lonely courageous hunter.”

I twirled a peacock feather. Remembering Omar’s Mont Blanc 149 piston-fountain pen, I said, “I also need a bottle of ink.”

“We have Black, Midnight Blue, and Cornflower Silk Red. British Racing Green just came in.”

“Racing Green. Sounds fast. Let’s try it.” Omar would be pleased with this expedient color.

I switched subjects to seduce her with my silver tongue.

“Are you free after work? Perhaps we might have a drink and some tapas? Perhaps a little mango tango?”

“I have other plans. I am not sexually repressed. I am liberated. I have a secret blind lover. He peels my skin to enjoy the fruit. Here you are,” handing me cartridge boxes and a bottle of green ink with a white mountain.

I paid with a handful of tears and a rose thorn. My ink stained fingers touched fine and extra fine points of light.

Faith and her extramarital merchandise were thin and beautiful. She was curious.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“It was nice meeting you,” I said. “By the way, have you seen the film, Pan’s Labyrinth, from 2006, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro?”

“Are you crazy or what? 2006 is five years from now. How could you know about it?”

“I live in the future. It’s about your Civil War from 1936-1939, repression and a young girl’s fantasy. It’s a beautiful film on many levels. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland.”

“Wow,” she said, “I loved that film, especially when Alice meets the Mad Hatter. Poor rabbit, always in a hurry, looking at his watch.”

“Funny you should mention time. A watch plays a small yet significant role in the Pan film.”

“Really? How ironic. I’ll see it in the future.”

“Yes you will. The future memory will inspire your spirit, art and life.”

I pulled out my Swizz Whizz Army stainless steel water resistant Victoria Abnoxious pocket watch, laughing.

“My, look at the tick-tock. Got to walk. Thanks for the ink. Create with passion.” I disappeared.

Faith sang a lonely echo. “Thanks. Enjoy your word pearls. Safe travels.”

Sitting on a park bench under a Banyan tree I fed cartridges into a mirror, clicked off the safety and turned a page.

It was a musical manifesto with a touch of razzamatazz jazz featuring Coltrane, Miles, Monk, Mingus and Getz to the verb.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Burma, 2015

Duende

In June 2001 I called Pascal, an airline ticket broker in Montreal and set up the itinerary. Seattle, Detroit, Amsterdam to Casablanca round-trip for six months.

“When do you want to go?”

Another draft of A Century is Nothing would be abandoned by mid-August. I selected a random date.

“September 1.”

“What did Narcissus say when he saw his reflection in the water?” said Pascal during a conversation.

“What?”

“Watch out for yourself.”

“Good one.”

“We’ll take care of it,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

“Thanks for your help.”

A ticket to dusty roads in another village, town, city, country and continent offered new adventures. KISS. Keep it simple stupid.

Leaving was a wise karmic decision. Speaking of history.

I checked out of living between fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive fuel at Hanford and the Umatilla Army Disposal Site where 7.4 million pounds of discarded chemical weapons waited to be incinerated.

Humans would be vaporized in an instant if the winds of change shifted. Weapons of mass destruction glowed in backyards.

My future lives were freedom, choice and plenty.

Two months after 9/11 while writing in Cadiz, Spain I visualized my incarnation as a calm word mercenary on an existential literary mission.

I created and wrote with discipline and perseverance.

I had duende, an untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit and dark sound.

It signifies a charisma, emotion, expression and authenticity manifested by flamenco dancers, bullfighters, shamans, prescient seers and weavers. Audiences feel they are in the presence of a mystical power. The duende is an elf or goblin in Spanish and Latin American folklore.

The Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca produced the best description of duende.

“Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel. In that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Marrakesh

Celebrate

I just want to celebrate
Another day of living

Vocabulary of touch

Pleasure principle sensuous femme fatale guide

Mutual satisfaction
Release tender tension

You stash your bags in a simple bamboo room
cut through a distorted distracted disrupted deserted
zone of empty rattan chairs to the beach
It stretches from Sin City to expensive southern resorts
M/F teams rake mourning sand

Grains complement musical melodic waves
breaking the shore day after day
Enjoy a slow walking meditation on a long empty beach

Breathe in - out
Water music laps ankles
Yellow dawn streaks sky
You salute the sun

Celebrate another day of living

Three green islands float long ago and far away on an event horizon
Bright red, blue and yellow tourist boats plant anchors
Engines hum fuel songs

Day unfolds. A lotus grows from mud.

Angkor Wat

Life Gift

To feel better, clean my heart, purge old fears and improve the quality of life I climbed down to donate a pint at The Blood Bank. Good old hemoglobin.

Suffering from cancer, a hospitalized child I will never meet, know, or love needs platelets more than I do. It’s been sixty-four clicks of Earth’s rotation between donations. It’s the best re-cycling program on the planet.

Give the gift of life that keeps on giving.

My calmness meets a scared mother pacing sterile emergency rooms at Sacred Heart Hospital wondering if her daughter will receive essential ingredients in time. 

A solemn-faced, stressed out cardiovascular lab tech with his personal set of challenges and opportunities, said to her, “At this moment we have no matching donors. We’ve released a global search engine to see what’s available on the market. People are selling short to cut their losses. It’s all about supply, demand and the fear of poverty. Scarcity. There are indications of further interest rate cuts to stimulate consumer confidence. We have no immediate indication of a stimulus. We will keep you informed.”

The mother doesn’t need to hear this prattle from a white lab coat.

Fingering her bone prayer beads, skeleton heads shake, rattle and roll. Fingers caress thorns. Everything happens by accident on purpose in her life, speaking of destiny, fate and chance. Life for her and millions in the land of the free, home of the brave and broke is free will versus random chance.

Everything’s already happened. People need to experience it while confronting their shadow and alienation, loneliness and loving community in a corrupt, cynical, hysterical greed-based world where people try to Control their fear.

Write FEAR & ANGER on a paper napkin.

Burn it.

Let go.

Citizen sheep believed in fear and unsustainable consumption because they were afraid of being lonely and poor.

Happiness is a myth. The wish of desire said so.

Humans were willing victims of their fear, healthy uncertainty, and doubt. Their amygdala, a small almond shaped brain structure creating fear and emotional response fired up. Fight or flight?

Are you the hunter or the prey?

Manipulated by the collective unconscious and a pervasive system of socialization control mechanisms, consumer sheep were happy. The subtle influence of right wing conservatives and media addiction bought idiots. Facing their mind-numbing daily grind with heart breaking choices sheep needed someone/something to Control them.

Accepting responsibility for their freedom was scary.

Intelligent centered ones feeling gratitude and empathy in their heart danced with Death. Everyone lives and dies.

“You work, breed and get slaughtered,” said an Asian child with a junior philosopher badge.

It’s essential to die once while you’re alive. Get it out of the way.

Saigon amputee, knife sharpening man.

*

I carried a copy of Omar’s book, A Century Is Nothing from Turkey to Indonesia to Nam in 2009.

Together with Omar we used fire, this crucible of alchemical combinations, diversities, sweat, blood and tears to create it so I’d use fire to release it. Save books, build a library.

Books are universes of ideas, experiences, feelings, visions, paths, and destinations obliterated through discovery, reminding memory. They are worlds of dreams, stories, dramas, plays, songs, histories and guides into new visceral experiences.

Pages sing their laughter with wisdom, song, and poetry. Preserve memory. Live forever with paper’s tactile voice. Voices of reason, comedy, and tragedy are skintight drum stories. They are oral transmissions recorded on parchment, vellum, and illustrated manuscripts in Irish Gaelic talking tongues, Sumerian clay and Asian scrolls.

I didn’t burn it, a way of sacrifice offering and letting go. Down the road in Saigon I gifted the brick to three Asian women. They had Chinese ancestry from Hong Kong and lived in Australia.

I said a friend wrote it so I signed it and laughed letting it travel with them. Thanks for the book. You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy it. It took all three to carry it. They staggered up guesthouse stairs with the tome.

After breaking down a wall they struggled to get it through an opening. People need to break down before they break through. Maneuvering it into a bag they discarded cheap Vietnamese souvenirs. We’ll have to check this monster all the way to Sydney.

ART

Saigon piano practice

Ice Girl Talks

Banlung is a gateway to isolated animist villages up river. The Tonle Srepok River is the river of darkness. The Apocalypse Now River.

The river overflowed with extended tedious years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved wooden faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, animal sacrifice and rice wine hearing the low dull roar of high altitude B- 52 bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering humans, mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing.

Mother saw a whirling bird, called a helicopter. She wove it with our traditional motifs of weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, playing music, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story.

Before writing, after cutting and selling ice, I weave.

Animists believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony and healing sacrifice near the river. She smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Villagers are superstitious and trusting.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust.

One prolific business in Banlung is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the single east west paved artery were brown wooden homes and shacks of rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded and pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125cc engines and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Freedom worked 24/7.

Under a broiling sun tempered by a soft breeze they carried buckets of cement over boards, pouring it on red dirt. Freedom shoveled 21 muscular sandy efforts into a wheelbarrow. Freedom pushed it to a new world order construction site filled with profound expectations and poverty’s paradoxes.

Ice Girl in Banlung