Leaving early

On September 1, 2001, Mr. Point was wedged next to the window of a puddle jumper flying over the Cascade Mountains. Next to him in economy was an overweight happy couple anticipating their future first class flight to London out of Georgia. Ten days before people on, from and inside cells placed long distance calls from caves.

“We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends,” said the wife, an alcoholic, “and then,” her husband chimed in, “we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food. I’d like to go to Costa del Sol. I’ve heard the culture is wide open, if you know what I mean,” rubbing his secret jewels and winking to the stranger.

His spouse wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh. Their combined girth was conspicuous 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. If your top-secret security clearances are valid. The more you know the less you need. 

“I’m heading to Morocco to meet my female nomad lover and extraneous fascinating strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the Extraordinary Rendition Program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer suspected terrorists to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fake companies.”

The shadow of Little Wing, a weaver, passed them.

“If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they boil them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap or country music twenty-four 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 Chinese harvested internal organs and upright pianos 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 profit 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 promised another road, village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic potentials. The KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, principle. Just leaving was a wise decision as it turned out. Speaking of history.

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

A Century is Nothing

stateside fear

“I’m afraid you will have take your boots off,” said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw Point’s scarred Swiss climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.

“Anything interesting happen while I was away?” said Point.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift ?”

The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.

A retired homeless bag lady approached security. “It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.”

“Why not?” said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. “Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, and seventy guns.”

“Look like things have really improved since I’ve been gone,” she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. “Now I feel really safe.”

Point removed his boots and passed through detectors. Along the concourse he studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:

Beware! This could happen to you.

Live in fear.

Report any and all suspicious activity.

Do not trust anyone.

Spy on your neighbors.

Report them to the Secret Police.

Do your civic duty.

Big Brother is watching.

He knew it’d come to this. He’d been far away, in Morocco and Spain imagining this Brave New World with precise clarity.

Returning to the United States of Advertising after centuries on the ground he sat down in a cabin on 8,000 year old Kalapuya Indian ceremonial soil. He had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter. 

A Century is Nothing

go up river

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up the Tonle Srepok River.

The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing.

She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. I weave after ice.

Animist village people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy local woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony healing sacrifice. She’d smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Village people are superstitious and trust her.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust down river in Banlung.

One prolific business in town is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the one east west paved artery are huts and shacks of rough brown wooden slats and rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125 cc engines, and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Village shaman.

blind music

Once upon a story lived a tribe of kids. They laughed and played all day.

Poor ones collected cardboard and plastic water bottles along a red dirt road.

Kids with money went to school.

A blind man played his flute on the street. Memory answered as notes disppeared into the void.

A bird whistled. Poetic interpretation. 

A man without hands, a landmine survivor, blind in one eye stood near a cafe. His one eye smiled, he nodded his head, thank you after a well dressed man gave him money.

The rich man smoked a cigarette as friends discussed new business opportunities. They invested drug and prostitution profits in new glass and brass tourist hotels.

We have to put the money somewhere, said the rich man.

Yeah, said another man, we can't put it where our mouth is.

You can say that again, said his friend, giving a beggar child old notes.

defrost

Here's what may have happened with his friend, the V woman.

One requires sex when there's no electricity. Quiet, all the humming power is down. 

It was mid-day and hot. Humid thick tropical heat.

Her first class open door and windows were covered with newspapers to prevent strangers from seeing in. 

He parked his bike and entered. She was defrosting the fridge. Smiling, they hadn't seen each other for days. They hugged speaking languages. Grateful to know their needs and passion.

They showered, soaping each other down. She gave him a towel and a swig of mouth wash. They spit in the sink.

She climbed on, kissing his nipples, moving to the statue of liberty, salivating, stroking, kissing and sucking. Yum-yum. He spread her red lips and slowly brought her to nirvana. They took care of each other before, during and after.

They showered, enjoyed a long cool drink of water, laughed, smiled sharing an embrace.

Life is big and we are small, she sang. Life is found in a desperate situation.

He pedaled into heat. She finished defrosting the fridge.