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Friday
Jun272025

Burma Isotope U-235

An emaciated bald mad broken toothed male junkie in relapse approached me on a Hanoi street.

He was on his personal quest for salvation. I am from North Korea. I spent seven years as political-economic prisoner in Burma, he postulated after dawn prowling Old Quarter needing a permanent change of address with no zip looking for someone to talk at. He was a lost one.

He was the star of his reality entertainment program. He blathered a blue streak. He was naked with belief and madness.

He ranted, I tried to sell the Burma generals nuclear arms from NK. I was this close to closing the deal, making a peace sign, They need to protect themselves from the big bad hostile world. They are paranoid idiots. Anyway, I have friends in NK. Hey, business is business. They sold me the goods. I paid cash.

In Burma I got mixed up with the wrong people. Schemers and deceivers. They lied. They cheated. They played me for a fool. They stole all my fissionable material and locked me up. I had everything: triggers, U-235, isotopes, plutonium, uranium, plans, diagrams, designs, centrifuges  ... the works  ... it was the full course meal  ... you have no idea  ... you just don’t get on a plane with this stuff.

One Burmese general’s wife wears $50,000,000 worth of gold and precious stones when she takes a shit. Can you believe that?

He continued: You need to go by boat from NK to Sing Some More. In Burma they made me sing in prison. I was in the choir singing for my supper for seven years. My voice is shot. I was lucky I wasn’t shot. They tried to shoot me out a cannon. I got stuck in THE SYSTEM. Un-fucking believable, I should write a book called Seven Years in Burma. Do you have a pen and paper. I need to get it down before it evaporates like morning dew.

How did you get out?

I became an informer rat. I took care of people. I developed relationships. Relationships and timing is everything in life., I bought and sold information. I sang for my supper. I did hard time. The nuclear stuff was worth millions on the black market.

I was born in a black market, stall #101. My mother was appointed to have me. I made a killing in Iraq. Literally. Mercenary work. Black ops. I went to N.K. I made connections with the Ministry of Fear and Nuclear Ambitions.

I worked. I paid. I got the shit out. Then it collapsed like a house of democratic chad cards in Burma. I played the Joker. It was wild. The Burmese said, Show us your hand. I did. They cut it off with a rusty machete. He held up his ticket stub.

He was beyond wild. He had his remaining hand out looking for compassion in the form of an exit permit.

An empty hand holds everything.

He lived on Dream Street at noon o’clock where a dusty Vietnamese grandfather clock strikes 12 inside a deep black gravitational void. Bong-bong-bong-bong. 

He jabbered his shadow illusion away past same-same travel tour shops, same-same bored boom-boom girls waiting for same-same tourists offering them same-same cash for same-same skin merchandise and same-same sleeping motorcycle hustlers.

He was the blues personified. He had a permanent case of the walking blues. He pleaded quiet desperation with anyone who’d listen. He was trapped in Hanoi with people hustling to eat. Hustling to dream. Girls hustling to fuck Mr. ATM cash flow. Hustlers hustling happy meal to happy meal needed a bailout from IMF.

Life’s karmic wheel of birth and rebirth spun him in circles.

Conversations love distractions and you can’t step in the same river twice.

It’s not the same river and you are not the same person.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Wednesday
May072025

Hoi An

I took a bus to Hoi An. We passed through Da Nang, a mess of glass and brass mega resorts swallowing farmland with miles of beachfront developments creating imaginary golf courses faster than speeding high finance and rabid speculation.

I am on the street early. A winged shadow caressed my forehead. A black and orange butterfly fluttered in front of my eyes. Touched, grazed, blessed by Psyche. Magic.

I am a prime lens on a 35mm tool. I capture soft light inside the old city. I slow down, feeling free, curious and open wandering. Before noise and lightning bolts of laughter’s language fills the air. Tourists sleep off heavy European food and distilled beverages. Streets are empty.

 

A young woman under a bamboo hat shovels sand. It takes her 21 gestures to fill up a wheelbarrow. No more, no less. 21. Blackjack. She pushes it down a street to a new home project. She dumps it. She repeats the process. All day. Every day. Her Tao.

I walk to the river near an ancient Japanese Bridge built in 1593 and sit near two elderly women. They’re surprised to see a foreigner sitting alone with coffee. Black with ice. I smiled. They smiled and whispered strange man alone has a camera it’s so early for him to sit here with us. We shared humanity, silence and morning light.

We communicated without words. I see their lives, childhood, growing up here, families, surviving wars, and meeting every morning for conversation, walking and tea.

Supporting each other they walk through quiet streets, past yellow walled homes with red tile roofs protecting long deep brown wooden interiors. Ancestors whisper stories from the 15th-19th century when Hoi An was the major port in Southeast Asia and the first Japanese settlement in southern Vietnam. Ships unloaded cargo and loaded high-grade silk, paper, porcelain, tea, sugar, molasses, medicines, elephant tusks, Sulphur and mother-of-pearl.

Now 400 tailors measure, cut, sew, iron, hang, and sell threads.

Women in teddy bear floral pajamas play badminton chasing a shuttlecock. Pajamas make utilitarian sense. Cotton is cheap and easy to wash. You sleep in them, get up, cook, eat, talk to your pajama neighbors, sweep dust, yell at your kids because they are spoiled brats and terrorized since escaping the birth canal, go to the market, buy food, admire new pajamas, return home, eat lunch, talk to your pajama neighbors and take a nap. Pajamas have a warning label on the collar. Remove Before Sex.

Pajamas are cool. One size fits all.

Residents stretch and talk. A leather-faced canoe woman set up her small clay figurines under a tree. The two women finished their tea, gestured goodbye, held hands and walked across a wooden bridge taking care of each other.

 *

Nature is my inspiration, said Eric, a sculptor from Europe. He has a gallery with an elegant hard gray marble sitting Buddha in the central window facing the street. Eric is 45 and thin with a deep lined brown face and brown eyes. He sits below a large leafy tree surrounded by his huge marble flowers, Buddhas, Jesus, bowls and delicate petals. He drinks milk. I drink green Chinese tea.

 

I’ve been depressed for three months. I feel sad and empty now. I haven’t had any new ideas for a long time.

He’s had his gallery for four years. The landlord wants the place back I need to find a new space for my gallery, he said. He has a workshop six kilometers outside town near Marble Mountain. I lived in a Swiss forest for thirty years. Nature is my teacher. I studied with a Hungarian master. I have to go now. Goodbye.

*

I wander along the river and stop at a food stall. A young German eating noodles shared his story.

He looked at the river as blue boats ferried people back and forth.

This place is a little Disneyland, I love Mali and Ethiopia, it’s what happens when countries and governments save historical places and they become well known to tourists. Governments develop them with monetary and cultural motivation to capitalize on a place with potential profit. Local people often get squeezed out. Others adapt and make a decent living.

Tourism = money = tourism.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Friday
Apr182025

Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.


Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.


Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.


His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Tolerance danced through life.

Sunday
Mar022025

Dead Dog

Hope is the last thing that dies, yells Dave’s wife. Take out the garbage fat man, lose face idiot, hide your shame, raise your voice like a torn flag of authority, signaling your displeasure with infants, get them in line, shape them up because you can’t ship them out.

You will raise them to yell with the best of them. They will yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep and cackling crows sending shivers down your spineless pitiful form filled with regret, anger and fear manifesting your tight choking life under long cold florescent lights in a shattering glare.

 

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers. They will burn you and carry your photo to the village artist who will memorize your face in black and white tones. On the family altar we will look at your frozen 8x10 face forever and give you fruit and water offerings.

We  burn incense so your spirit can eat, so it will not be angry and return as a yelling, demanding, hungry ghost or an invisible reliable scripter. You will perform your filial duty

One day in the near future of now, your dead ancestors will remember sounds, words, phrases and life sentences called talk-speak until they achieve the decibel level required to rejoin the family’s formless form. They will compete in yelling contests with speaking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, spouse, child, boss, lover, or stranger yells. I ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells again a little louder. No answer. I wait for them to yell louder, said a ghost hiding in Silence.

Silence is Form, Style, Sensation, Nothing and the Reality of Death.

After I’ve made them yell three times I answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living nightmare. To teach them a lesson I answer with a Whisper. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with other yellers around them.

They are distracted by sensory stimuli overload.

I embrace chaos in the glare of ancestor memories. My sweet revenge.

I reject them with silence, a deadly comprehensive weapon.

Two ghosts whisper - give them 1,000 lashes with your tongue.

 

I have 1,000 arms and 1,000 eyes.

My name is Avalokiteshvara.

I am a Bodhisattva of compassion for all beings.

I churn the Ocean Of Milk at Angkor Wat.

I am infinite wisdom in the ocean of wisdom.

*

Ha Noise people evolve in small tight spaces where voice people practice perpetual eternal racket over each other and don’t listen and yell louder while others ignore them and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, Feed Me!

Angry Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas, the Vietnamese national costume  ... They are a cheap red pastel cotton decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had no choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to pay big money and marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents while growing up which is how they grew into this higher intelligent life form  ... to reproduce.

Their destiny is to breed, work and get slaughtered down on the killing floor.


I pass narrow minded little hovels guarded by locks, doors and rusting metal curtains. Alleys are crammed with sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in alleys using round perforated compressed coal, workers haul cement, bricks, wire, and stones creating glorious Marxist production methods using a knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, and control stick elephant. All fine well and good being a means to an end everything.

An end to a means the end, the means steams beans, streams data.

Lying in a neighborhood street packed with screaming, beeping careening manic cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling wilting produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs, glassy brown eyes. Inert. This spectacular spectacle attracted everyone. They escaped homes/shops holding something valuable and precious.

CUT! yelled the Director

Characters froze in place.

Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens a leaf, a man oiling a bike a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood  ...  

a girl held her red balloon, a retired man his glass of urine beer  ...  

a grandmother gripped her grandkid everyone staring at the dead dog as twilight rush hour motorcycles beeped impatient musical cacophonies negotiating through the blind crowd to get home to families, sex, food, television and safety before dark.

ACTION!

A thin old man emerged from his small dark space, perfect for hiding from strangers, invaders and dust. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs lifting it in the air, dripping blood. He was a hunter holding a wild hare following a successful adventure on the moors. Wild hounds flushed it running wild, filled with fear and free. They treed it, trapped it and killed it.

His inscrutable face showed no emotion. He held the dripping dead dog.

Blood formed a small pool on pavement surrounded by angry confused voices of friends, neighbors, and strangers pealing like bells in his cerebral cortex offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas and significant silences minus appropriate words inside or outside the mystery and quality of death personified so he stood there holding the legs until he laid the dog in the gutter and the dog’s body relaxed itself into itself.

He turned away from neighbors and beep-beep fascination. He entered his dark interior space with shadows and ghosts.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Sunday
Nov102024

Children of the dust

Omar said, Down on mean street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

 

 

Like Tran, she is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one good leg after finding a landmine on her way home from school. She is one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by landmines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflict.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million landmines buried in 45 countries. It costs between $300-$900 to remove a single mine.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, Ukraine, Laos, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia is unused because of landmines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee. She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from their skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

 

 

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked through pristine rice paddies near her village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around her.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2. She never saw it coming. She didn’t die of shock and blood loss.

A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot her up with morphine. All the strangers and happy ghosts carried morphine. Standard issue. Grateful, she speaks the language of silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged