Clean your ears day
Greetings,
Today and everyday is International Clean Your Ears Day.
It's a big deal considering ears are so small and portable. They go everywhere you go.
The first time I had my ears physically deep cleaned was in China. A woman at the empty opera place in Chengdu one Saturday morning. I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were clean and disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax, cotton swabs soaked in liquid. I wrote about it in 2004.
It's a great feeling. BUZZ!
WHAT?
Today was another opportunity to get the old ears cleaned. Bliss baby.
I've located a street barber here in Saigon. He's on the corner of Noise & Confusion, a main drag through the heart of a swirling mass of mobile humanity. Beep-beep.
His place is an example of real bare bones marketplace essentials. He has a very small corner of a cement area surrounded by a wire fence with a gap on the sidewalk. One old comfortable broken barber chair, a lopsided table with a mirror. On the table are his ancient well used tools; blades in cheap paper, electric trimmer, a straight razor, comb, and brush.
Cut black hair spills out of a green plastic bag near the gutter waiting for someone to collect and recycle it. Makes good stuffing.
The aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed this debris and clutter:
- cycle of cycles
- incessant trajectory of love and passion
- bird songs
- laughing children
- crying, whining, screaming children (many over 25)
- heart broken lovers
- distraught wandering tourists
- dancing fools (you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance)
- distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels
- minstrels
- singers, dancers, hustlers
- motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, wage slaves
- laughing slaves
- lonely philistine Filipinos in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather and shoes and jewellery on sale at discount stores
- bored frustrated wives and their husbands
- unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, homeless, and orphans
- fortune tellers and assorted prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations and clear intentions
- nutritional experts and particle collider scientists
- visions of a supreme creator laughing at all of us
- people who say, "I don't have a hearing problem. I have a listening problem."
- your choice. All for $2.77.
What? Open ears, open mind.
Metta.
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