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:

1. cycle of cycles
2. incessant trajectory of love and passion
3. bird songs
4. laughing children
5. crying, whining, screaming children (many over 25)
6. heart broken lovers
7. distraught wandering tourists
8. dancing fools (you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance)
9. distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels
10. minstrels
11. singers, dancers, hustlers
12. motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, wage slaves
13. laughing slaves
14. 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
15. bored frustrated wives and their husbands
16. unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, homeless, and orphans
17. fortune tellers and assorted prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations and clear intentions
18. nutritional experts and particle collider scientists
19. visions of a supreme creator laughing at all of us
20. people who say, "I don't have a hearing problem. I have a listening problem." 
21. your choice. All for $2.77.

What? Open ears, open mind.

Metta.

Fat and Happy

Man works metal.

Greetings,

(Editor's Note: This was originally published in A Century Is Nothing and in Novel Excerpts.)

On September 1, 2001 he was wedged next to the window of a puddle jumper flying over the Cascade mountains.

Next to him were an overweight happy couple in economy anticipating their future first class flight to London out of Georgia. Days before people on, from and inside cells placed long distance calls from the edge of caves.

“We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends,” said the wife, “and then,” her husband chimed in, “we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food.”

She wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh and their combined girth was sweet consumption. They exceeded their weight limit. The scales of justice were balanced in their favor as they spilled wealth.

“What do you do for a living?” her husband asked.

“My friends call me Mr. Point. I work for The Department of Wandering Ghosts Ink. 24/7,” he said with a straight face. He was a survivor, Vietnam 1969.

“Busy, busy, busy,” he laughed. “Yes, I am a mercenary of love, an unemployed fortune teller if you must really know. You might remember me from the Academy of Pain and Anger Management if you have a need to know. The more you know the less you need. If your top secret security clearances are valid.

“I’m heading to North Africa to meet my female nomad lover and various strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the extraordinary rendition program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer terrorism suspects to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fictious companies.

“If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they start boiling them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap music 24 hours a day to drive them crazy. Stale bread and rancid water. A grisly business, but hey, it’s a paycheck.

“We also set up off shore accounts for clandestine agencies, or fronts if you will. We collect raw opium in Afghanistan, process it in Asian labs so street addicts get their fix. Along the way we collect internal organs to sell in Hong Kong. The market is diversifying. Pick em’ up and lay em’ down. No women or kids. We have to draw the line somewhere, eh?

“Business has never been better. Ain’t nothin but the blues baby.”

They cut him off after this truth. His one-way air ticket to Morocco and Spain; another village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic realities and fewer intrusions on his sanity. The KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, principle. Just leaving was a wise decision as it turned out. Speaking of hiss-tree.

“Beyond, beyond the great beyond,” he’d whispered to someone when they asked him where was he going and why did he do what he did with the who, when and howdy doody yankee doodle dandy stick a feather in your cap crap paradigms.

Metta.

Chinese street food in a hard cold cruel world where life is short, brutal and nasty.