Clean Ears

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Paradise. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion oratory

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance                      

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your heart, open your eyes, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Zeynep

Escaping an insane world Zeynep enjoyed a long sauna. She scrubbed off dead cells.

She walked into a spacious white marble room with a high vaulted dome and thermal pool as 32-points of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles and eight recessed ochre cubicles where women soaped, slathered, scrubbed, melted and relaxed in thick mist heat.

They were divorced from anxieties, fears, husbands, lovers, kids, tedious housework, tomatoes and brown tea. Natural mineral water was a simple luxury of musical respite. Zeynep savored an extensive massage. A muscular woman worked sandpaper fibers over her skin.

Zeynep dove into unconscious thermal waters. Renewed, she enjoyed fresh squeezed orange juice and meditating in spring air below snow covered mountains and blue sky, I’ve defrosted my imagination.

She sat on a stone wall seeing a brown valley, plains and distant rolling green hills where lights on cooling towers at a nuclear reactor blinked red. She discerned movement inside a sloping field of yellow wild flowers and tall spring grass. Animal alert.

Working its way through and down was something large. A cat perhaps a snake. A large green brown turtle waddled into view. Splendid. Carrying the world on its hard shell back with a hexagram, it covered terrain headed for green.

A rusty wire fence enclosed its universe. It turned away from dreaming and exploring, its instinct directed it toward green, around trees, through forests brimming with life, soil, smells and textures foraging forward in paradise. Turtle memory.

The hexagram on its back was clear. You will travel far. Slow is natural. You will live long.

It was uncanny how Z discovered one word in a poem about an orchid feeling loss, rectifying it’s beautiful existence in white light and black shadow.

Possessing consciousness, Orchid was imprisoned and comforted by charcoal. Blooming free it released scents rendering humans comatose with pleasure.

Zeynep stood on a Metro platform. When it arrived neurotic impatient passengers rushed glass doors like hungry tigers attacking their brother’s keeper with hormone free meat  ... They believed by rushing the door it would spring open quickly  ...

They were stymied in their desire, their quest for immediate gratification arriving on steel, an air conditioned nightmare of lightning bolts as they pressed relatives and strangers against glass trapped & staring at shimmering reflections of their grimacing faces.

Word Factory doors opened.

Today is a good day to be happy & empty.

Practice emptiness and non-attachment, whispered Leo, a Tibetan monk.

Not too detached and not too sentimental, said Zeynep, his telepathic artist friend in her Bursa restaurant drawing stick figures with wild forested hair living in paper mâché houses beneath a startled sun in a well-thumbed black Moleskine as ravenous shopaholic eaters crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat and rice mixed with gaseous beans. They stuffed food into bland faces while texting erotic pornographic messages to lovers.

To eat is to love.

Food sex shelter air water are essentials. It’s the Middle Way, said Z.

Leo was grateful to meet Zeynep. She renewed his faith and trust in art, friendship, free play and creativity without expectations, outcomes or ego with clear childlike curiosity. Expectations and reality are illusions.

A Lao monk wrapped in orange robes danced in cool dust before morning alms. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Bursa Hammam by Z

Crows cackled at sunrise. Bamboo Nomad opened the blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment in Bursa, Turkey, riding the blinds a metaphor for rails, a cryptic railroad life of drifters and literary outlaws hopping a freight out of town, rolling.

Light particles streamed to a pink and red veined orchid in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled in white light. Red gladioli, oh so glad, petaled their beginning. Piano Etudes tinkled by P. Glass.

Fear, a handful of dust in an urn labeled Gratitude, celebrated laughter.

A piano fell silent. Violins and a cello picked up the slack hemming their garments at intersections on life’s loom, said Devina.

In the new world order all the police and security forces are children they know how the world works. Kids have a shock proof built-in shit detector.

Storytellers agreed.

Elegant cirrus clouds swirled around pachyderms and Staunton pieces fighting to control the four center squares.

A quixotic knight errant with a curving silver scimitar followed by Panache on a donkey waving a red one-star Vietnamese Communist flag sailed through Russian thongs and throngs driving a Turkish turbo-bus near Hanoi hair salons where women trimmed Winter Hawk’s talons.

Bright yellow coughing taxi engines heard Arabesque musicians fingering Ouds lamenting loss forever as percussionists hammered goatskin drums  ...

Turkish silver merchants sang, Lucky sale, First sale, Cheap, Make my day.

In a Bursa hammam built by the Grand Vizier Rustem Pasha in 1555 filled with blue and green geometric tiles and vaulted ceilings, steam rose through rusting bars to locate a Wi-Fi signal from the private Achebadem Hospital emergency room staffed by stressed out C-19 doctors looking over thin shoulders with lost bewildered aimless fear in trepidation toward lost bewildered aimless fat ugly white idiot tourists named ATM dragging their lives and dusty packs on tired shoulders through Asia as hungry heartbroken wolves paced tight narrow cages lamenting loss of freedom howled the blues.

Humans are wolves in sheep’s clothing, said Tran.

Chekhov said there are three paths. Choose one.

Turn left wolves eat you, go right you eat wolves, go straight you eat yourself.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

State of Becoming

One Saigon day a nomadic TEFL facilitator having a look-see visited ELF, a local English Language Factory.

He didn’t go in. He’d researched the business from Hanoi. It was a large well-funded managed operation with branches.

At a nearby java joint he met a teacher from the State of Becoming, SOB.

He said, We have good support. They offer a CELTA certificate costing you $1500, we have resources and a wide range of ages, groups and abilities, I’ve been here one year and my experience is positive, we have good team focus and professional development, they take care of work permits, new teachers without the CELTA are required, at a 50% discount, to take the course. Education is a business. There is flexibility and structure, the educational level is higher than Hanoi, one piece of advice, if the student is 28, they have the emotional level of 21. (-7)

This EI  is common in Asian schools. Teachers - parent #2 - tell kids what to think not teaching how to think.

Serious factoid. Push kids through The System minus critical thinking skills.

Oh, to be human…

Old man, young woman...

Wordsmith danced his final farewell Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble twenty words. Write one clean honest sentence.

Twenty words. Twenty quick painless illuminations about the 60-year-old man in THE BLINKING LIGHT. Retired American or European.

Smoking, drinking a beer, wearing a flower print shirt. Alone. He called someone. Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He grasps both her hands expressing deep gratitude. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love and salvation from loneliness, alienation, suffering and life’s blues. She comes to his emotional rescue.

He handed her the wine list. Anything you want, it’s yours. He is grateful to know and receive her. I want your heart, she said. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation. He is Mr. ATM from a lonely-hearts club band first aid. Mouth to mouth recitation.

After a quiet romantic candlelight dinner they returned to his hotel room. They danced naked for dessert. She traced his spine with fingers. He rested his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat, hearing the thump-thump-thump drum muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arterial aerated erotic aortas. Be the drum.

For one brief night in their healthy beneficial addiction they held each other with desperate desire before Tran’s Dream Sweeper machine collected everything at dawn. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Absurd Language

Do you want the short version or the long version, asked a reliable narrator of dubious credibility.

A perfect question in life’s chess game of experiences and conversations as people play with choices and consequences inhaling, exhaling, living, traversing, falling, flying, exploring, and walking on the spinning Earth rock, said Devina. Rock your world.

The celestial rotation makes people dizzy, confused and disoriented and many fall down, said Tran. Hello gravity.

WE fall up, said Rita.

If you flesh out the short narrative version with specific details it grows, said Z. Character threads develop. Destiny and action forms character.

Destiny weaves a rope of hemp fibers, or woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia, or Cambodian cotton, or Lao silk worm threads designed to hang yourself if life becomes unbearable, perhaps too sweet, too beautiful, too sad, said Desire.

Determining your fate suicide is a daily choice and a way to escape a terminal adventure travel disease. You are manipulated by someone in the story before, during or after you finish a random simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on. Adventures evolve a life of its own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten word lava from a highly charged pressurized center.

The reader and writer are one.

Short, fast and deadly.

This explains how silence between words sees language as absurd, irrelevant and a burning ring of magma fire.

This molten conglomeration of Voice and Sign language, dust, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, 24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and geological logical particles discovered by humans and alien life forms blast out of the deep red hot core of finite transient human existence into a blue atmosphere where it cools, as the gravity of thinking, agrees to ignore the abyss and it’s malcontents and expectations of loss fear and Death contributing to its infinite force.

The dense mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, dances flowing down engulfing everything in its path melting landscapes, carving new strata, grand canyons and Leaping Tiger gorges, gouging out tributaries for cooling debris, slowing to a glowing light as you open a vein and scribble one true sentence, said Z.

O my word let it cool, heat and serve. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged