Page 90

“Ok,” said the writer kid, “how’s this sound? Write everything in the first five hundred pages, uh, I mean five pages. Grab the reader with a hook at the beginning of every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and the end of chapters. Start and end sentences with a strong word.”

“Good idea,” said a kid, “keep them turning pages. What happens next is a reader’s quest.”

“People are born, live and die. People fart around. Nobody comes. Nothing happens. We are the architects of our actions and must live with the consequences whether glorious or tragic. Is this a fill-in-the-blank life test?”

“I only want you to bring two things to class,” screamed an overworked, underpaid, undersexed Hanoi teacher afraid of losing face in front of eighty robots. “Your ears.”

She pounded on a podium with her Marxist pedagogical elephant control stick, “Memorize the text idiots so you can vomit the material on a test.”

“I’m going to be sick,” said a bulimic kid.

“It’s ok to be horrible,” said a kid. “Some writers quit because they want it to be perfect. Many never start. Many never finish. It ain’t about starting, it’s about finishing. Write your dash between birth and death. You need to be passionate about your work without being obsessive-compulsive. Do it because you love it. Make a beautiful fucking mess. Clean it up and make another beautiful mess. Release the monster into the world.”

“Yeah,” said Tran, “a work of art is never finished. It’s abandoned. Like an orphan.”

“Editing is a form of censorship,” said a kid waving rejection letters. “You don’t want to make the reader work too hard do you?”

“No, most humans are lazy. Obese, addicted to fast food, screen visuals, social web sites, FaceLost and sex texting with short attention spans. CONTROL owns them. No attention span? No problem.”

“Rewriting is writing. Be cold and unsentimental. Polishing is the party. Being a writer is like having homework every single fucking day.”

“What’s a word doctor?”

“Someone who red lines manuscripts,” said a blind kid waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston fountain pen splattering A- blood on everyone in their radius. “They kill words and sentences.”

“Writing is like digging a well with a needle,” said Orhan Pamuk.

“Punctuation is a nail. Period.”

“Just tell the truth,” said a Cambodian orphan boy, one of 12,000, “and then you don’t have to remember what you said.” His parents rented him to an NGO on weekends for donor sympathy advertising.

“The truth is I need a fix. Does anyone have any spare drugs?” said a gazebo group addict, “I need to get out of here and mainline an adventure.”

A Vietnam veteran screamed, “More drugs, nurse, more drugs. I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody.” A nurse shot him up.

“We, you, he, she, us, them, they, little old me and I ain’t going anywhere,” kids chorused.

“Where’s the scissors? We need a sharp edge here.”

“When you cut into the present the future leaks out,” said William B.

ART

Your mask eats your face.

Story

“That smells nice,” said the garbage collector to the sage burner.

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themselves. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I meditate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

ART

Freedom

“We are caretakers of Mother Earth,” said the shaman girl.

“I want to swallow the world but I am too full of sorrow,” said one.

“I’m going to start a club for procrastinators,” said another, “anybody want to sign up for unlimited access?”

“Are your needs being met?” said Rose.

“I have a need for freedom and a freedom from need. Perhaps I’ll end up taking care of people like us,” said a girl named Hope. “I’m the last myth that dies.”

“Yeah, you can work in a day care center for adults.”

“That’s a-dolts.”

“Hah. We are all death deferred,” said Martha Ann, fixing her glasses with duct tape.

Seeing her experiment with optical illusions, a kid said, “Remember James Joyce? He said, ‘Wipe your glasses with what you know.’”

“Are you plagiarizing again?”

“No. It’s taken out of context.”

“Textile, tactile, texture, context, content, abstract, where’s it all going?”

“Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract,” screamed an abused child being whipped with a fishing pole by his neurotic mother in a wheelchair.

“Are we wondering or wandering?”

“Where’s eternity end?” said the astronomer kid.

“I’m going to study the bottom line,” said a boy raising a digit testing imprecise global economic market index indicators based on assumptions. “If we control the debt, we control the country.”

“International financiers and corporations run the show, babies. Politicians are their slaves.”

ART

Mandalay Palace

Martha Ann

After Nam I spent a month with my family, did the DOD School and went to Germany to finish my military time.

My sister, Martha Ann, 13, developed a cold that winter. My father wrote letters about her condition. Her energy dropped. She became weak. He took her to doctors for a diagnosis.

She had a rare form of AML leukemia and started chemotherapy. She needed bone marrow transplants in her short future. The prognosis was maybe five years for a complete remission.

She prospered in school and Girl Scouts with a positive mental attitude.

Neighbors had horses and she formed a loving relationship with them.

Her long blond hair flies in wind. She embodies a strong discipline in the saddle. Her back is straight. Approaching a jump over an abyss, fear is defeated by her courage.

She leaves the stable leading a Palomino. She wears tall black boots, riding pants, and a stiff white shirt buttoned at her frail neck. Only I know she is sick and dying. It is our secret. She smiles at me.

She whispers magic words and you know by the animal’s response they love and trust each other. She rides in green pastures under a bright blue sky. Her face is serene.

Her sickness was a long slow meandering journey. She maintained her optimism, smiling, laughing, and doing excellent in school. She knew she was sick. She was a warrior girl child.

Horses gave her freedom and passion. She rode every day after school. Weekends were cleaning, grooming, laughing and loving her relationships.

She had a clear spirit. No fear.

Her pain was a sickness leaving her fragile body.

Doctors tried every experimental drug on the market. Drugs made her long blond hair fall out. She wore a wig. She tolerated inane questions and insinuative cruel bullying from classmates. She maintained her dignity and integrity.

“Dad, what happens when they run out of experimental drugs?” she asked at dinner. He had no answer.

The broken-hearted man brought his daughter home from Children’s Hospital in Denver for her last Christmas. She enjoyed snow, a warm fire, magic tree, cats, presents and love.

Her heart gave out three days after Christmas, 1972.

I received the expected phone call at the Kassel Field Station.

“Martha is gone,” said my father’s cracking voice.

“What happened?”

“I went to the hospital on my lunch hour and she was lying there and she looked so beautiful yet so weak and she said, ‘Dad, hold me, I’m going to faint,’ and I did and then her heart stopped. It just wore her out.”

I cried, “I’m so sorry dad. I’ll get a flight out.”

“You will always remember her as a happy little girl.”

Angels and peace welcomed Martha Ann.

She never saw fourteen of anything. She never went to high school or college, fell in love, worked, lived, laughed, traveled, explored future worlds or experienced a longer life with her vibrant trembling spirit.

Her existence was all wrapped up in one tight package with an expiration date.

Cold winter was her refuge and now.

Her childlike joy and spirit energies soared away from her labyrinth. She evolved on her path of light, love, and perfection. No longer a human on a spiritual path she was a spiritual being on a human path.

On her brief sojourn before crossing time’s river she demonstrated tolerance, integrity, kindness, tranquility, dignity, empathy and truth.

Martha Ann validated her authenticity. She hurled her thunderbolt.

ART

Burma

Ghost in exile

After 364 days an officer pinned red and yellow campaign ribbons on me. I caught a freedom flight from Saigon to Alaska, ran across a frozen tarmac in thin khakis for java and flew to the City by the Bay.

“Anybody want a steak?” said a sergeant processing arrivals.

“Screw the steak. Give me a new dress green uniform. I’m out of here for a flight to Colorado.”

I became a ghost in exile. No one spoke to me. I understood their reticence, fear, guilt and awkwardness seeing me in a military uniform.

Passengers were anesthetized by their life and media propaganda and TV images seeing the dead come home in black body bags. Prime time madness sold soap.

I remembered Samuel at the 265th, “Better than going home to abuse, derision, scorn, apathy and unemployment.”

I’d seen things they would never believe. They averted their eyes with social indifference and I understood. They’d remained static in their work, eat, and sleep routines.

I’d shifted my consciousness with quantum precision. I survived a transforming life experience.

You die twice. Once when you’re born and when you face death.

Surviving a year in a macabre police action zone where an imperialist government tried to impose a Catholic leader on a Buddhist people gave my life new meaning.

It taught me impermanence.

One life - no plan - many adventures sang with clarity and awareness. I create or destroy my freedom.

In my dream I hike past a crude sign hanging from rusty concertina wire at a deserted firebase:

Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.

I locate normal in my portable lexicon.

Normal is someone you don’t know very well. Like yourself.

I used to be somebody else but I traded him in.

ART