Dr. Death - TLC 81

After eating Turkey with trimmings, Simon Says, a fat jovial American educator with an M.A. in Obscurity collecting centuries on his resume escaped Indonesian archipelagoes on short notice.  

He accepted a new job in the Middle Eats to pay for his emergency life support expenses while employed at a private Jakarta school.

Lucky returned home from his fare-thee-well dinner of grilled-fired fish, rice, veggies and giant prawns swimming in garlic to discover a medium size cock-a-roach scurrying toward dark safety.

One room smelled of Turkish delight, a sweet gooey mixture of nuts, berries and flakey pastry. Another room was resplendent with tropical bird songs and silk warbling blues riffs, improvisational cool cello bass lines and the sweet taste of a flute.

Behind locked doors sad, lonely, angry, and neglected spoiled crying Asian and Turkish humans rehearsed songs of alienation, loneliness and boredom.

Amnesic rooms dancing with autocratic sensations remembered how Simon perceived his decision to decline a doctor’s advice and proceeded with a dangerous medical exploratory option to check out the source of his internal distress.

“No anesthetic,” Simon told Doctor Death. This decision almost killed him in a microscopic moment inside Time, a valiant teacher, an educator, facilitator and an arrow of non-renewable resource. His decision cost him vast quantities of blood. He needed many transfusions from barbarians and strangers.

During exploratory surgery Simon felt a warm light bathing his skeleton. Understanding by Design.

Simon saw God. God said, “Later Simon. I will wait for you.”

 Simon was frayed fabric. A needle dripped volunteered slavery. Lying in his hospital bed Simon contemplated what is life.

Mental gymnastics: Why do simple medical challenges escalate into a life-threatening crisis? Rash misunderstanding of how and why my body said, give me pain killers and my monkey mind ego extinguished flashing rational emergency lights ignoring warning signals common sense and professional medical advice. 

Being a Super Hero had its risks and rewards.

The Language Company

memory is hunger

I saw my first Cambodian woman with a prosthetic right foot. It was her gait.

How she dragged the green olive drab right leg behind her as she crossed the street. It reminded her of a lost condition where one whispers know more than they reveal.

She was maybe 40, give or take a moment. It was a moment years ago when she stepped on the invisible land mine. Her story evolved into family taking care of her. Relatives patched her up. They tied her leg with vines to stop the flow. A doctor. Blood. Pain. Tears and memory.

Memory is hungry. I need more victims, said Memory.

She absolved her faint transitory belief in Buddha and mysteries. I am grateful to be alive.

After she went to SR she got her new leg.

She practiced walking again. She developed the drag.

If her husband and family rejected her

she ended up in the city sitting on a sidewalk selling string

Begging

Stringing life line life time string

Life lesson #5 - TLC 49

What is life, said Lucky.

I’m a big seven as in seven, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator. Your life is not a test or a dress rehearsal. If it is an actual life your invisible friends protect you from ignorance and fear with courage.

My dad’s not very smart. It’s his DNA, a string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It’s the rainy season. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

It’s pouring like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver passenger van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress a dry writer polishing words by using his intelligent hose running wealthy water over rain. Cleaning. He gets a free shower.

He ignores me. I am a tool.

Grandmother sits on our austere 1924 colonial dark-brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong offering Buddhist monks handfuls of rice. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

My grandfather stares at rain, forming lakes.

Daddy’s very busy. He disappears for hours drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for cash. A poor girl from a poor family in a poor country needs to make a living poor thing.

My mom’s also smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever? Maybe that’s the answer to your life quest-ion.

Survival with a capital S.

After the rain when it's dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and burning candles she incinerates plastic garbage. Yeah. Yeah. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It's a sweet smell let me tell you. Like when Duvall in Apocalypse Now said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. That smell. What's the word? Acrid. 

When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby delivery service. What’s another mouth? She manages home, kids and cash. I’m worth $3,500 on the stolen kid market in China. My older sister would’ve been aborted. Bad luck for her.

Mom ignores me. I am a tool.

She’s super busy doing her gentle mother routine. Later, she squawks. She's a soft kind later.

Parents and teachers and millions of lazy humans here love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life value.

Milling around is an art form with style. Art transforms life.

Lao are soft and kind. We have a good heart. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera in a gentle breeze.

The trick is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you alone. Zap like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

Nature’s a great teacher. We are nature’s tools.

For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg after discovering a landmine in paradise. 

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around.

It kills time alleviating boredom a dreaded lethargic tedious disease.

Boredom is fear’s patience.

Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get a life and accept personal responsibility for choices and consequences.

Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam are alive with unexploded ordinance, amputees, superstition and ghosts.

Existence is one long perpetual distraction. Say what?

You may as well do what you love because you're going to spend most of your life doing it. We breed, work, get slaughtered and mill around. We are told to blend in to survive. My mom taught me this hard cruel life lesson. She reminds me every time I open my mouth to express an original freethinking idea. That’s what parents and teachers teach us by example and they have extensive Life Experience - another amazing teacher.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, courage, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you develop self-control and courage?

By failing. Fail better. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Life is trial and error and taking risks. Daring is not fatal.

Thanks for life lesson #5. You are the future of Laos.

You’re welcome. I have my junior philosopher’s badge.

Burned woman - TLC 47

Well removed from erotic games of loneliness, regret, alienation and impending loss Metro doors opened at 9:23 p.m.

She limped in dragging her right foot. Scared. Excruciating pain. Alone and cold in a thin black sweater and long gray skirt. 45, slight of sight, olive pale skin, black hair pulled back. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot resembled elephantiasis.

Bending down she raised her skirt from around her ankles. Burned and bloody skin ran three inches across and ten inches high. First or second-degree burns exposed a layer of red lined white skin. She touched an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors.

She needed medical attention. Two embarrassed men diverted their eyes.

Grimacing she fingered a phone. No tears.

Metro rolled through darkness, over a river, past an Everest furniture store flashing red neon and shuttered Doner diners.

Why was she alone on a freezing late night in a flimsy sweater her skin below the knee running to her ankle burned away exposing blood red lines wearing an abstract expression on her sacred scared distracted face watching night fly past windows where blue flickering TV images and children eye spied on each other as she kept going

past the expensive private hospital on a hill gleaming its extensive intensive care wards filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions, potions and patients with money as her treatment was delayed, forgotten, useless now

because she was poor and silent in her seat, anxious, feeling pain wondering where she’d go, where she would end up on this cold dark night of her soul

as a stranger

lacking the ability to heal her studied her anxious passive expression feeling her violent burning sensations as fire and heat nerve impulses penetrated synapse sensory channels where signals blocked by neurotransmitters shut down her final inconvenient chance.

The Language Company

Heart Monitor - TLC 45

On the Metro he sat across from a young boy, his mother and father. Father’s hands were hard calloused.  

The boy smiled, fascinated by whirling flashing light prisms. His father pulled up his son’s shirt. On his chest were two plastic suction cups and a machine the size of a deck of cards. Ace high. The heart monitor measured his beats, his life rhythm regularity. His father checked the display, saw the cups were secure and dropped the shirt.

“It is a machine for my son. It helps him,” he said with tired eyes. “We got it at Hospital A. Doctors said it was essential for his life.”

The boy and Lucky smiled, cupping hands around eyes scanning the universe, explorers with telescopic magnifying lenses.

He’s a happy kid. Not afraid of a thing like Tran my five-year old Vietnamese friend in a Da Nang hospital missing a leg after stepping on a landmine teaching me Courage.

“We should all be so fortunate,” said adults streaming sad life tales, “Oh pity me. I am so, so tired.”

Talk to the kid. He’ll tell you how tired feels.

Echoes of umbrella digger stone music faded near young lovers huddled on benches and a beggar dreaming on tarmac.

Children with sacred eyes on magical adventures balanced on silver tracks escaping dark tunnels. They disappeared into wild winter aspen forests as two black-shawled women negotiated muddy paths through foliage waiting for spring to thaw out relationships with nature.

Rabbits running in ditches sang The Season of the Witch.

Living breathing bipedal accidents with a pulse craved a place to happen with insight, precision and brevity. Pearl letters played out on a fragile necklace of water-beaded molecules inside an instant in eternity.

Time is a strung-out pimp looking for a fix and exit.

The Language Company