International Shoeshine Boys

By No One special important or famous.

Tools: a box, tinned colors favoring dark brown and black, a rag picker’s dream, a pair of sandals for a barefoot customer, a toothbrush for those hard to reach places and a buffing brush.

A boy in Marrakesh, Morocco plays Arabic music on his box with his brush.

A smiling Turkish boy in Bursa spins shoe polish cans with Roma dervish flair.

A Vietnamese boy in Lao Cai designs shining skills in tribal dialects.

A Cambodian orphan wearing a LANDMINE t-shirt sings about saving soles. Everyone here wears sandals. No chance said Dance.

A Chinese shoeshine boy discusses existentialism and learning disabilities with an NGO from Australia on a junket.

Where are girl shoe shiners? They are zero. They sell flashlights. When their red battery light indicator shows low power they sell their skin. Feeling empty they barter their interior semi-moist flexible vagina dialogues with a dark-eyed sullen abject apathy. Their emptiness increases silent oral heartbreak and viscous density before their mark comes in 8 seconds or less singing the blues.

Tran sells books at the Main Train Station. What are the titles?

a. My Life is a Beautiful Accident. I am a Fluke of the Universe.

b. Travels in Empty Space w/ Stardust Memories

c.  Cambodian Woman Pure Drinking Water

c-1. No Money No Honey Abridged

c-2  The Language Company, A Century is Nothing, ART, Grow Your Soul, Book of Amnesia Unabridged- Leonard

d. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

e. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

f. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

g. A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe – Fernando Pessoa

h. Song Lines - Bruce Chatwin

i. The Book of Disquiet - Pessoa

j. The I Ching

k. Facing Unpleasant Facts, Animal Farm, 1984 - George Orwell

l. Seven Japanese Tales - Tanizaki

m. The Art of War - Sun Tzu

n. The Tao Teh King - Lao Tse

o. The Book of Tea - Okakura

p. Invisible Cities - Calvino

q. Through The Looking Glass - Carroll

r.  Here Bullet, Phantom Noise - Brian Turner

s. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Joke - Kundera

t. The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut

u. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe - McCullers

v. Travels with Herodotus - Kapuscinski

w. WE - Yevgeny Zamyatin (precursor to 1984, Brave New World)

x. Fate is A Cruel Joke - Monkey Face

y.  Why I Always Look Back - Genocide Survivor S-21

z.  The Little Prince

aa. Against The Day, G’s Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

bb. Fairy Tales: The Short Attention Span of Biped Mammals

cc. Yeah, Yeah - Two immortal words: by Asian students

dd. How & Why Asians MILL AROUND with Panache

ee. How Simians Saved Earth with Stealth, Cunning and Deception by Whining

ff.  Blindness, The Stone Raft, The Cave,  -  Jose Saramago

gg. The Book of Chameleons -  Jose Eduardo Agualusa

hh. Pale Fire, Ada, Lolita - Nabokov

ii. Hunger - Kurt Hamsun

jj. The Glass Bead Game – Hesse

Disenfranchised junkyard dogs share mediocrity and human adolescent listlessness with rolling thunder microscopes. They create extensive noise. No meaning or value. There is USER value and EXCHANGE value.

What is louder than a group of Khmer / Lao people? Another group of Khmer / Lao people. Everyone celebrates two fleas dancing on a dog. Exciting.

Bored humans wander around. Dogs sniff butts, yap, fuck, and chase blind tourist rats down blind alleys careening into dynamic futures where the sound of one hand clapping echoes with growling gamelan cymbals. Dogs form a canine club, Bark n’ Bite.

Escher’s perceptual art includes elements of line and tonal quality. A dot, a line, a circle, zig-zag, oval. Seven basic forms create all art.

Synesthesia. To feel or perceive sensations in one part of the body produced by stimulus in another sensation. See sound. Hear color. Taste light. Smell conversations. A lie’s smell is disguised as truth flavor.                 

Every day I walk through a mine field where any false move could be fatal, said Roberto Bolano, a poet from Chile dialing 2666. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

In Hanoi by Ku

Ku said, I feel embarrassed when I go to Hanoi. They call me Little Cat.

She is from the Black Hmong tribe. She is 16 and Sa’s youngest daughter.

I am confused there. Too many cars and buildings. It’s hard to see the sky. The city is too big. It is noisy and scary. I get lost. She smiled.

Do you know what we call the Hanoi city people, talking monkeys. They go to Sapa to buy cheap Chinese junk. They miss the noise, motorcycles, tall buildings, endless clatter and traffic confusion. They run into buildings. They hide. They are afraid of nature. They complain it’s too cold it’s too hot it’s too weird say the city people with all these noble literate savages trying to sell us things like bags and embroidery and nature walks.

They don’t fool me.

Yes, they are strange animals. Because I am smart I speak many languages; our Hmong dialects, Dzao, Tay, Vietnamese, Mandarin learned from Chinese traders in the mountains, English, European words, even some Tibetan.

Cool eh, I love languages, especially nature’s language, like animals, mountains, clouds, rivers, sky, and wind.

Many people need more life experiences, she reflected on a cool rainy day in Sapa sitting in the market overlooking valleys hearing birds and noble savages sing their authenticity and integrity. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Be The Brush

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden.

It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ...

Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

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