Love is

Love is a blind whore
With a mental disease
And no sense of humor.

+

Slow.

Lesson? Sustain the art.

Siem Reap

1)    motorman sings his sad tale of "no money"

2)    the endless hard luck story

3)    rows of empty ugly hotel monstrosities line the Highway of Death

4)    being Sunday Someday, SR is more destitute than a hungry girl waiting to go to bed with a hungry man

5)    people salvage trash in the rain

6)    air is thick with moisturizer and masks

7)    Carl died. He left a young Cambodian wife and two boys, 12 & 6. Heart attack.

8)    I feel this deep loss. Profound sadness.

Needs. Drama. Story. Conflict.

Give it an edge.

Theme : loss, passion, alienation, boredom, loneliness.

One week ago he sat in a Lao garden. It rained.

Everything smelled deep, pure, beautiful.

Five months in Vientiane helping grades 6/7 be more human.

Sitting in the garden writing - polishing manuscripts about Turkey, China, Indonesia, affectionately called Amnesia.

For the last three months while playing with kinder garden kids from 8-3 he'd been involved with Ling who came from the war ravaged interior and worked the massage biz.

During the course of their pre-meditated hot sexual relationship interspersed with gestures and broken Lao-English guttural intentions, he bought her a phrase book and dictionary and English primers, and a hand-made paper notebook. He gave her colored pens and watercolor paints. She had the skill and artistic eye.

At night he read as she created in precise detail large Lao images of dancers, village life, coiled serpents, and vivid representational fantasy/reality cultural art.

He was astonished and supportive.

She was happy. They were in temporary attraction, lust, desire, passion. They shared lives. She relished the generous and serene outpouring of her emotion and creativity.

He told her he'd leave the school, town, country and her after a month.

They cried. They hugged. She painted a final picture of the holding hands, walking up the street lined with flowering lilac trees. Another had them hugging, shedding tears.

He suggested she keep her art alive. She said she would. He suggested she make a portfolio of her work and show it to galleries.

He flew away.

A vanishing point on life's canvas.

Ling's Art