A 3,000 Year Old City

“Once upon a time,” Nino said one bright future day as the tribe rolled along, “and such a strange time it was, the gravity of thinking played music in a new century. There was a Spanish man with a hammer. At exactly 9 a.m. on an overcast Cadiz morning he began chipping away at unexplored caverns. The Alio modo Fugue a 2 Clavier by Bach drifted in the background.

“He was building an extension on a roof where housing was scarce and straight up. The only split-level ranch duplexes with multiple garages in sight were American reruns on old battered televisions. He hammered stone the sheltering sky. It was over 100 degrees. His hands bled. Blood seeped through an old Moorish roof splattering into a room where a writer in exile lived with a blind prophet. Hemoglobin landed on a keyboard. On the B. He let it dry. He treasured sudden rare immediate insights. Drops fell and congealed.”

“Fascinating,” Omar said turning a page. “And then?”

“Down below in deep morning shadows Rosario swept her front stoop on Benito Perez Galdos. Her white apron was clean and starched. She swept away yesterday’s accumulated debris and the fine mist of pedestrians coming and going. Old shit, dog urine and dust received her mop’s holy water. Their accumulated real and imaginary sins littered Galdos, heading for the gutter.”

“Let me guess,” said Omar, picking up the thread, “church bells pealed eternal melancholy songs of hope and redemption across from the Castelilo de Santa Catalina, the main citadel of Cadiz built in 1598.”

“Exactly,” Nino said. “Inside tight white oval corridors, an exhibition of black and white photographs depicted Nicaraguan people fishing, polling canoes through tangled jungles, chopping down forests, sitting for the camera, living and laughing. One room held beautiful black handmade fans in tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca.

"Considered the greatest poet and playwright of 20th century Spain, he was assassinated by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) a Franco death squad in August 1936 for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality. He belonged to the Generation of 1927 with Dali and Bunuel identifying with the marginalized Gitanos and woman chained to conventional social expectations in Andalucía.

"He wrote about entrapment, liberation, passion and repression. A long red scarf lay draped over a single rattan chair. Invisible wires held black fans decorated with peacock feathers and rainbow colors suspended in silence. Outside a dark window Atlantic waves smashed ramparts.”

Nino took a breath. Omar sacrificed an orange skin to enjoy the fruit.

Weaving A Life, V1

1st International Children's Conference

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.         

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

*

Meanwhile, the 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about:

slave labor, hunger,

exploitation, corruption,

human trafficking

and the terrorism of economic poverty.

 “Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $96 in a Bangladesh clothing factory.

Cambodian women making $190/month stitched garments for export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family.

Let’s Eat.

key

Ink whispers secrets of silent mystery where life is found in a desperate situation.

Young boys stare at a writer.

The blind lead the blind.

Everything is Under Construction at the Source.

The vast self.

Existential awareness.

Cessation of sensation and perception.

It's a walking meditation.

Rivers, like people, only know why they were born when they reach the end.

Poverty and illiteracy. I work, I breed, I get slaughtered.

Imagined or invented conversations and episodes.

Fiction is a tool for unveiling, not obscuring the truth.

Literary fiction expounds historical truth.

Necessity of choice.

Loom

A character said with a secret JOY you have returned.

Yes, she says, my dream of you is unfolding. She caresses silk threads on her loom of time. Your sensitivity and serenity calms me, he says.

Before dawn. The Mekong river is water. Fog obscures distance. She stands at a window looking for him. He is on the river. His net flies over still deep water. Threads and knots of jungle vine land on the surface. They sink into silence.

She hears the Mekong sing. She returns to the source. Sleep. She dares dreams, aware of voiced whispers in silence. Silence becomes her sense of desire. She follows desire. Gratitude, her awareness, calms her tortured heart. A leaf leaves the tree of life.

Transparent water bowls sing. A purple lotus grows from mud.

She is at her loom. Her pattern begins with purple silk. This is her base. She runs threads through thin lines of balance. Twin bobbins spin out golden threads for new diamonds. Weaving is her meditation. Her voice. It is her heart-mind, hands, fingers and feet.

Book of Amnesia, Volume 3

Gonzo journalism. Creative nonfiction. Jazz prose poetry.

Life experience. System analysis and social autopsy.

Genius kid friends share adventures and stories.

This is a flawed masterpiece.

Everything you need to know is in this book.

This work incorporates stories from Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia and Utopia.

Book of Amnesia, Volume 3

ISBN: 9798859766413